August 9, 2015

Gamma-ray burst map showing a ring 5 billion light years across (Image courtesy Lajos Balazs)

An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes the discovery of what appears to the largest structure of the universe. It’s a ring of nine gamma-ray bursts, which means as many galaxies, for a length of 5 billions light years. This ring, though it’s not really a circle, seems to contradict the current models and in particular the cosmological principle, the idea that the distribution of matter in the universe is uniform at a large enough scale.