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Ultra-Large Structure Discovered In Distant Space Challenges Cosmological Principle (scitechdaily.com) 60

Posted by EditorDavid from the big-news dept.
"The discovery of a second ultra-large structure in the remote universe has further challenged some of the basic assumptions about cosmology," writes SciTechDaily: The Big Ring on the Sky is 9.2 billion light-years from Earth. It has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years, and a circumference of about four billion light-years. If we could step outside and see it directly, the diameter of the Big Ring would need about 15 full Moons to cover it.

It is the second ultra-large structure discovered by University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) PhD student Alexia Lopez who, two years ago, also discovered the Giant Arc on the Sky. Remarkably, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc, which is 3.3 billion light-years across, are in the same cosmological neighborhood — they are seen at the same distance, at the same cosmic time, and are only 12 degrees apart on the sky. Alexia said: "Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe. And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important — but what exactly?

"One possibility is that the Big Ring could be related to Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). BAOs arise from oscillations in the early universe and today should appear, statistically at least, as spherical shells in the arrangement of galaxies. However, detailed analysis of the Big Ring revealed it is not really compatible with the BAO explanation: the Big Ring is too large and is not spherical." Other explanations might be needed, explanations that depart from what is generally considered to be the standard understanding in cosmology...

And if the Big Ring and the Giant Arc together form a still larger structure then the challenge to the Cosmological Principle becomes even more compelling... Alexia said, "From current cosmological theories we didn't think structures on this scale were possible. "
Possible explanations include a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or the effect of cosmic strings passing through...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
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Ultra-Large Structure Discovered In Distant Space Challenges Cosmological Principle More

Ultra-Large Structure Discovered In Distant Space Challenges Cosmological Principle

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  • Ringworld exists !!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • "From current cosmological theories we didn't think structures on this scale were possible. "

    And yet fractal cosmology and the "self-similar-cosmological-model" predicts exactly this. Order and form at all scales, big and small. no largest, or smallest. only scale.

    Current theories are human-scale centric. Why should our scale be the only important one?

    • Re:humans always think we are at the center. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday January 20, 2024 @07:31PM (#64175835)

      There's a lot wrong with your post.

      We are the centre... and so is everything else.

      The scales involved are not human. They're the scales at which masses would no longer (according to current theory) have been able to have gravitational interactions due to the limit of c and thus should not have formed coherent structures. After the instant of the Big Bang, distance and time were things and every point had a cosmic event horizon just as is the case now.

      • "We are the centre... and so is everything else."

        This annoys the crap out of me. Look, I know what it's getting at, and you could make the same argument using an inflating balloon - and it would be accurate, but it's not *useful*, it's just pedantic as hell.

        If you measured the speeds and trajectories of every visible galaxy and drew lines backward along them, then barring a rare weirdo or three where something unanticipated happened in the history of that galaxy's travel, those lines would all intersect at

    • As BaronYam says, current theories are speed-of-light centric, not human centric. The constancy of the speed of light (in vacuo) is as well established as our technology can test it.

      Just for a laugh, can you give me a handful of buzzwords that any serious study of "fractal order" and "form cosmology" or whatever it is you're selling, would use. It might be entertaining to see how much work has been published in your field.

      No, I'm not going to search YouTube. Just the written word.

      • "The phase velocity of an electromagnetic wave, when traveling through a medium, can routinely exceed c, the vacuum velocity of light. For example, this occurs in most glasses at X-ray frequencies."

      • The OP is probably discussing a third-hand re-telling of this https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]

        • Third=hand retelling - after the idea was ritually gutted of all it's meaning, flensed clean of it's contact with reality, then subjected to the full Vogon nine yards of abuse, neglect and wilful misinterpretation.

          I'm already classifying them as "all the intellectual rigour of Young Earth Creationists, but without having put in the hard work to try to make their idea hang together when swinging in the breeze, oscillating merrily".

          • In their defense, ability to appreciate ideas like this one requires at least an undergrad degree in physics, which is four years of hard and largely thankless work.

            It is sad that the ability to explain these ideas in a simple way isn't usually a part of the curriculum, but then developing this ability is probably harder than the degree :)

            • It is sad that the ability to explain these ideas in a simple way isn't usually a part of the curriculum,

              That would be part of the PGCE (Post-Graduate Certificate in Education), which is TTBOMK about the minimum entry level for education beyond the potty-training stages. But I'll admit I haven't ever looked properly at the question, having never considered a career in teaching, let alone teaching sub-adults.

              Teaching [something] is a different skill set to doing [samething]. Different training course, diffe

  • Cosmological Principle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Saturday January 20, 2024 @06:47PM (#64175761)
    The so-called Cosmological Principle (that the universe is homogeneous at sufficiently large scales) is nothing really but a simplest case assumption. There is no real evidence for it, and now it appears that there may be evidence against. If it is incorrect than all our models of the early universe (inflation, dark energy, etc.) have to be reconsidered since they all depend to some degree on its correctness.
    • new hypothesis: what if the universe instead of expanding it is just orbiting or rotating around an undiscovered central point (like our solar system) and it just appears to be expanding, and once we discover this central point it will open new ideas about the universe

    • There is real evidence for it, the evidence is called "cosmic microwave background" and it is, indeed, very uniform.

    • The assumption  of CP makes Einsteins "ball of dust" trope a practical matter. Equation-of-state simplifies. Imagine how hozzed classical thermo would be if gases casually formed  stable arcs and rings in any volume.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Care to explain any of that word salad or are you just running off at the fingers?

        • Noshellswill isnâ(TM)t nonsense, though poor grammar. If matter can form stable structures at any scale, it poses math problems for entropy always net increasing. Local increases in entropy can happen, but universally, the entropy accumulates somewhere. But that implies some scale at which structure is impossible. If no such limit exists, math says the laws of thermodynamics are wrong somewhere.

        • Surely you've done the "ball of dust" calculation for general relativistic expansion. Some physics prof had  a high-school math version on-the-web for years.
    • Clearly is a smoke ring left by the Great Arkleseisure after he sneezed and saw that it was a job well done.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Inflation should be suspect merely on the grounds that its adherents are physics salesmen; the same goes for the physics described in String Theory (not the mathematics though, that part is rock solid). Just because some measurements follow some mathematics does not imply the metaphysics read into the mathematics from the salesmen is actually part of the physics of the universe. In Time Reborn, Lee Smolin, there are alternatives to inflation. Roger Penrose has his own theory.

  • Giant Arc? Big Ring? Couldn't think of any better names?

    Was the Big Ring not big enough to be called giant, too?

    I know these are just placeholder names for things that only exist statistically, but really...

    • How does "Structure 14653958" or "Structure 3458097" grab you? Exciting enough?

      • Have a little poetry. How about the Celestial Crown? These astronomers really have no clue how to get funding.

        • These astronomers really have no clue how to get funding.

          Since most funding sources are many-times oversubscribed, I think it's safe to bet that all astronomers know, perforce, how to appeal to the sensibilities of funding allocation committees - which are a branch of bureaucracy notoriously devoid of romance, poetry or even good taste.

          By chance I was watching an astrophysics podcast yesterday where the presenter (a working astrophysicist) lamented that the ground-based telescope used in [the study under d

    • Couldn't they think of better matches? I mean... One can easily see at least 5 rings, more than 10 rectangles, bells, a heart and even that weird sum symbol from Leibniz. I can't imagine what neat stories would we have if ancient Greeks had better instruments.

      https://imgur.com/a/Z78SjTx [imgur.com]

  • What else could it be?

  • Or is it supposed to be closer?

  • Look after the ring for a '2'
    The full symbol is now: CO2
    They are laughing at us for our inability to tackle the climate crisis.

  • Crap science reporting (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Saturday January 20, 2024 @10:02PM (#64176021) Journal

    The article leads with an "artists conception" that's literally a giant silvery wedding-band structure - which obviously is NOTHING like what they're actually describing.

    Visual bullshit clickbait. The editors should be ashamed.

    • Here's the "image" of the "ark". Let me know if it confers anything more or less to you than the pic in TFA. Assuming you can see an ark :)

      https://www.uclan.ac.uk/image-... [uclan.ac.uk]

      • The Ark is blindingly obvious. Right smack in the center of the picture there's even a little house in the middle.
        All snark aside when I see stuff like this I remind myself that the human mind is a pattern recognition machine. We are very good at picking out patterns whether they exist or not.

        When I was a kid I used to stare at the static on the TV screen when it was tuned to a channel it wasn't there. After just a few seconds-- far less than a minute-- I would start to see shapes in the noise.

        I expect p

        • Humans are indeed pattern-matching creatures. BUT ... our species has had about 10-million years of feed-back to decide what pattern-match   promotes our survival ...  and which do not. Equating survival with reality is perhaps a stretch, but if I had to bet which rubber-band provides the best service ... 

        • Every pubescent boy in the early days of cable and scrambled HBO that his damn parents wouldn't pay for, was able to 'discern' ...enough... of images from what was nearly pure static.

          Or so I've heard.

      • They *could* show an interpolation from the data to the presumed pattern, to see how they identified the ark from that noisy image.
        • Especially for the ring though, as they do highlight the arc points in another image

        • The way it is done, afaik is, by plotting spots blotted out by faint galaxies from the quasar backgrounds. I presume they have something that would represent a field resulting from a uniformly distributed field and they run tests to see how different the two distributions are. So, the end result isn't a picture, but some coordinates with statistically significant differences. The patterns on the picture are what may prompt you to test, though. Like you said, people's eyes are good at spotting patterns, stat

  • Does a Conformal Cyclic Cohomology really explain this phenomenon? TBH this seems like imaginary thinking at this point. Have they looked for a residue at the center at least?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      My first thought on this was that they're possibly structures that from the Cosmic Web, albeit perhaps larger than anything found so far, or possibly predicted by current models, hence the fuss.

      Turns out, they actually do fit within the scales of that theory, and indeed are far from the only, or even the largest such structures found. That honour (currently) goes to the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall, which is around 10 billion light years in length - over three times the size of these. Ther

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      That's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology if you are trying to channel Roger Penrose. And I believe the scale is different for the ring structure to be the echo of a gravity waves from a black hole due to a pre-existing universe from ours.

  • Send him to investigate.

  • And then another ring And then you got three rings!⦠Ballentine beer commercial Or Kamala Venn Diagram Trying to explain something Weâ(TM)re too thick to comprehend? (Arc IS part of a ring Rest IS Composed mostly of dark matter As is the other ring.) Depends what definition of IS-IS? (Ring me up & we can talk about how this Is just an old beer commercial advertisement.)

  • ... we just don't know as much as we think we know.

    We mostly try to make sense of electromagnetic radiation just falling on us. Our stories are just as much "just so" stories as older stories.

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