No, the largest structure in the universe could be a gamma ray burst ring (GRB) measuring a whopping 5 billion light years!
The nine mega-energetic bursts, produced by the collapse of a massive star as it becomes a black hole, are about the same distance, 7 billion light-years away. In the sky they occupy an area equivalent to more than 70 full moons. And there is a one in 20,000 chance, experts estimate, that a group of GRBs will acquire such an arrangement.
Made by a team of American and Hungarian astronomers, the finding has puzzled the scientific community, since according to the Cosmological Principle, the universe is uniform over long distances, putting a 1.2 billion light-year limit on the size of any structure. cosmic . And that cap is almost five times the set of GRB bursts.
If it is finally a real structure, it could correspond to the rings of galactic clusters that surround the cosmic voids, detected and predicted by many theoretical models. The problem is that the nine GRBs cover a space ten times greater than any known cosmic void. Perhaps astronomers should rethink their theories about the evolution of the universe.
Image: The ring of gamma ray bursts is the nine blue dots in the center of the image. Credit: L. Balazs.
