EUROPE: Astronomers have found a structure in the universe so huge, that current cosmological theory says it shouldn’t exist
A US-Hungarian team recently discovered a ring of nine gamma ray bursts, in nine distant galaxies, 5 billion light years across.
For comparison, our galaxy is just a hundred thousand light-years across.
Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest objects in the universe, releasing as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does over its 10 billion year lifetime.
Recent evidence from recent satellites like Swift and Fermi indicate that the energy behind a gamma-ray burst comes from the collapse of matter into a black hole.
Their huge luminosity helps astronomers to map out the location of distant galaxies, something the team exploited to find the structure.
The Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) that make up the newly discovered ring were seen using a combination of space- and ground-based observatories.
They appear to be at very similar distances from us – around seven billion light years – in a circle 36° across on the sky, or more than 70 times the diameter of the full moon.
This suggests that the ring is more than 5 billion light years across.
According to Professor Lajos Balazs of Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, there is only a 1 in 20,000 probability the GRBs being are in this distribution by chance.
Modern astrophysical models suggest that the upper size limit for cosmic structures should be no more than 1.2 billion light-years.
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