Expert Vladimir Surdin: “They look at such discoveries, not just skeptically, but with caution.”
In mid-January, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, a report was heard on the discovery of an ultra-large structure in deep space, violating the traditional ideas of scientists about the Universe. We are talking about the Great Ring of the Sky in the constellation Bootes, which a group of researchers saw at a distance of 9.2 billion light years from Earth. Its diameter is about 1.3 billion light years. For comparison, there are 1.28 light seconds between the Earth and the Moon.
Drawing depicting the Great Sky Ring and the Giant Arc. Photo: Stellarium
The discovery of the ultra-large structure, which was called the Great Sky Ring, was made by the same group that in the summer of 2021 discovered the first similar structure in the neighboring region – the Giant Arc. This is a graduate student at the University of Central Lancashire (UK) Alexia Lopez, her adviser is Dr. Roger Close from the Jeremy Horrocks Institute of the University of California in Los Angeles and a researcher at the University of Louisville (USA) Gerard Villiger.
In both cases, the researchers used Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This is a large-scale spectral imaging project of stars and galaxies using the 2.5-meter Wide Field Telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
Both the Giant Arc and the Great Sky Ring, according to scientists, are formed from distant galaxies illuminated by quasars (bright sources of light in the visible Universe). Relatively speaking, very distant and very bright quasars act like giant lamps, shining through much fainter intervening galaxies that would otherwise remain invisible.
These structures, according to the discovering astronomers, change our understanding of what the “average” piece of space looks like. “According to cosmologists, the current theoretical limit is estimated at 1.2 billion light years, which makes the Giant Arc and the Great Ring of the Sky (the Arc's diameter is 3.3 billion light years, the Ring's circumference is about 4 billion light years) several times larger.
“Can the standard model of cosmology explain these huge structures in the Universe simply as rare accidents, or is there more to it?” – Alexia wonders.
Both geometric figures that interested scientists are visible at the same distance, next to the constellation Bootes. The large ring of the sky is located next to the star Alkaid (from the Turkish al-kaid – “leader of the mourners”) of Ursa Major. There is no explanation for these two super-large structures, according to Lopez.
According to astronomers, conformal cyclic cosmology (from the English “conformal cyclic cosmology” or “CCC”), proposed by Nobel Prize laureate Roger Penrose, can theoretically explain such phenomena. According to his theory, the Universe goes through cycles, where in each previous one, time in the future tends to infinity, and this turns out to be the condition for the Big Bang for the next one. Rings in the Universe could presumably be a CCC signal, scientists say.
The Great Ring is located close to 0 on the X axis and spans approximately -650 to +650 on the X axis (equivalent to 1.3 billion light years). Credit: University of Central Lancashire
Another explanation could be the effect of the passage of cosmic strings. Cosmic strings, according to scientists, are thread-like “topological defects” of enormous size that could have arisen in the early Universe. Another Nobel laureate, Jim Peebles, recently hypothesized that cosmic strings may play a role in the large-scale distribution of galaxies.
Moreover, the open Great Ring and Giant Arc together may form an even larger single structure, and then the challenge the traditional cosmological principle will become even more convincing.
– These structures surprised astronomers with their size. The fact is that the old cosmology operated with simpler ideas about the Universe. To solve the equation of general relativity, something had to be simplified. Even 20 years ago it was assumed that the Universe was homogeneous on average, that all density differences: planets – emptiness – stars – emptiness – were sensitive only on small scales, but if you take large pieces of space hundreds of millions of light years in size, then wherever you look, they are everywhere are the same. That is, it seemed that the Universe was a more or less homogeneous jelly. This, in principle, is not far from the truth, but the more accurately we observe, the more subtle differences we notice in the structure of different regions of the Universe.
Over the past few years, this has already begun to strain cosmologists. For example, the flight of the new James Webb Space Telescope, which has been flying for three years, has revealed two strange properties of the Universe. Firstly, the first stellar galaxies formed in it very early, almost immediately after the expansion began. We always assumed it was supposed to happen later. Gravity needed a certain time to create dense lumps of stars from homogeneous matter, and from them – galaxies.
Secondly, cosmologists have been puzzled by the giant black holes that have long been discovered in the centers of galaxies. We thought that they gradually gained their mass by absorbing the surrounding matter. But the James Webb and other telescopes have discovered that giant, or supermassive, black holes, billions of times more massive than our Sun, formed quite quickly after the expansion of the Universe.
– After only about 500 million years.
– Judging by the publication, they are classified as galaxies collected into groups not randomly, but in the form of geometric structures. But here you have to be careful. In my memory, similar structures of stars have been repeatedly discovered – “star rings”, “chains of stars”. Then it turned out that they were born simply by a feature of human vision. The eye really loves such simple geometry: looking for some geometric shapes among randomly scattered grains. Take a handful of some grain, pour it on the table and you will see circles and triangles made of grains. Therefore, they look at such discoveries, not just skeptically, but with caution, they say: “Let's see what comes of this. We still have to wait.” Maybe these are also random configurations that don’t make any sense. But the same seemingly frivolous discoveries at first glance can lead to serious revolutions in science.
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