The Big Ring is made up of galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Scientists have discovered a gigantic ring-shaped structure called the Big Ring an astonishing 9.2 billion light-years from Earth. This gigantic cosmic structure is made up of galaxies and galaxy clusters, with a diameter of approximately 1.3 billion light-years and a total circumference of approximately 4 billion light-years. To help you get a sense of its size, imagine that if you were somehow able to observe the Big Ring directly, it would span about 15 full moons across the night sky.
PhD student Alexia Lopez from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) made this important discovery, marking the second identification of a super-large structure. Two years ago, she discovered a huge arc in the sky. Interestingly, both the Big Ring and the Giant Arc, which span 3.3 billion light-years, share the same cosmological neighborhood. They are observed from equal distances, exist in the same cosmic time, and are only 12 degrees apart in the sky.
“Both of these two supermassive structures are not easily explained by our current understanding of the universe, and their gigantic size, distinctive shape, and cosmological proximity certainly suggest something important. It must be telling us that. But what exactly?” Alexia said in a statement: Published by the university.
“One possibility is that the big ring could be related to baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs), which arise from oscillations in the early universe and which today, at least statistically, are associated with galactic It should appear as a spherical shell in its configuration. However, detailed analysis reveals that the big ring does not actually match the BAO description: the big ring is too large to be spherical.”
“One might expect that there is perhaps one very large structure in all of the universe that we can observe. However, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc are two huge structures that make up the universe. They are even logically adjacent, which is very attractive,” added Alexia López.