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.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most intense energy emission in the universe and the latest observations suggest that they’re caused by the collapse of massive stars in the black holes. They’re also useful to detect very distant galaxies and in the case of this research they appear to be at similar distances, about 7 billion light years. If it was visible to the naked eye, it would appear 70 times larger than the diameter of the full Moon.

If the distances are similar, this means that the galaxies that contain those forming black holes, although far from one another, constitute in some way a gigantic structure. According to Professor Lajos Balazs of the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary, who led the international team that conducted this research, the probability that the gamma-ray bursts distribution is random is 1 in 20,000.

Studies about the anisotropy, which is the non-homogeneity, of the early universe and its consequences on its present look, have been going on for decades. A few months ago, a research was presented about the Cold Spot, a huge area colder than expected which could be the largest single cosmic structure never identified. It seems made of a cosmic supervoid.

The structure made of the galaxies containing the gamma-ray bursts identified in this research is much larger than the Cold Spot. It could be the projection of a spheroid in which the gamma-ray bursts occurred in a period of 250 million years. It would be similar to the strings of galactic clusters surrounding cosmic voids but it would be at least ten times larger.

Professor Balazs and his colleagues want to keep on studying this ring to see if it can be explained by the known processes of galaxy formation. The cosmological principle has been criticized virtually since it was proposed because its bases are vague. Today’s instruments allow observations observations much more detailed than the old ones so it would not be surprising if we were to rethink this principle in the future.

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