Scientist’s gaping ring changes what we know about the universe

The discovery of an unfathomably huge ring in the sky could change the way we think about the universe.

Scientists say the structure – which measures 1.3 billion light years in diameter, taking up a space in the night sky 15 times larger than the moon – is so big it theoretically shouldn’t exist.

Nicknamed the Big Ring, it was discovered by Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).

It’s the second time she’s found one of the immense formations in distant space, coming around three years after she spotted another named the Giant Arc which spans 3.3 billion light years.

She 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?’

The issue is that large structures in the universe are generally understood to have formed as a result of something called gravitational instability.

However, with this idea comes a size limit, due to the sheer amount of time it would take for something so gargantuan to form.

That limit should be 1.2 billion light years, which would discount the Big Ring (which, as it turns out, may not be a ring at all but a corkscrew-like helix with its face towards Earth).

Ms Lopez also pointed towards the cosmological principle, which says that the universe we’re able to observe is roughly similar to the bits of the university we can’t observe – in other words, it’s a ‘fair sample’.

She said: ‘We expect matter to be evenly distributed everywhere in space when we view the universe on a large scale, so there should be no noticeable irregularities above a certain size.

‘Cosmologists calculate the current theoretical size limit of structures to be 1.2 billion light years, yet both of these structures are much larger – the Giant Arc is almost three times bigger and the Big Ring’s circumference is comparable to the Giant Arc’s length.

‘From current cosmological theories we didn’t think structures on this scale were possible.’

Nevertheless, the Big Ring and Giant Arc aren’t the biggest such structures ever found.

That prize goes to the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which measures 10 billion light years side to side – give or take a hundred million light years or two.

Commenting on the new discovery, Professor Don Pollacco, of the University of Warwick’s physics department, said: ‘The likelihood of this occurring is vanishingly small so the authors speculate that the two objects are actually related and form an even larger structure.

‘So the question is how do you make such large structures?

‘It’s incredibly hard to conceive of any mechanism that could produce these structures so instead the authors speculate that we are seeing a relic from the early universe where waves of high and low density material are “frozen” in to extragalactic medium.’

Ms Lopez presented her findings at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) – the same place that recently heard about a stunning discovery on the nature of dark energy.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.