Sign of big changes: Galaxies in space inexplicably lined up in a giant ring
According to modern ideas of astronomers, the ever-expanding Universe today extends within a radius of 46 billion light years. More precisely, that part of the Universe that we can observe has approximately the same dimensions. And in this space, according to scientists, there are hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of galaxies.
They are not scattered chaotically, but are grouped by their own mutual gravity into clusters, superclusters and, ultimately, into threads of an unimaginable “web”, at the junction of which there are dense galactic “knots”.
A great variety of galaxy clusters of all kinds are observed in space. Here, for example, is the Virgo cluster. These galaxies are, one might say, our “relatives” or, in any case, “neighbors”: the Milky Way and our entire Local Group of galaxies, along with them, are included in the same Virgo supercluster.
In general, it is quite clear that galaxies seem to be collected together, but the resulting collections are outwardly rather shapeless. And when astronomers survey the Universe even, as they say, on the maximum scale, that is, on the scale of this entire great “web”, great interweaving, they do not expect to see any obvious geometric features anywhere.
No equilateral triangles, no squares, no octahedra and no circles. Therefore, several years ago, a young astronomer from Great Britain, Alexia Lopez, together with several other colleagues, extremely surprised the entire world scientific community with their unexpected observation: they saw such an arc in the constellation Bootes , formed by quite a large number of galaxies.
All these galaxies are at the same distance from us – 9.2 billion light years. And the structure formed by them has some completely unprecedented dimensions – more than three billion light years. The fact is that scientists do not even theoretically consider the existence of such structures larger than 1.2 billion light years possible. And the most interesting thing is that this is clearly an arc, that is, if you mentally continue to “draw” this curved line, you will get a giant circle.
So, now this story has received an even more amazing continuation: an almost perfectly even ring of galaxies has been discovered. Moreover, not only was it discovered at exactly the same distance as the “arc,” but it was also located in the same direction. Namely, in fact, not far from the well-known Ursa Major. And together with the “arc” we get this picture.
The diameter of the ring is 1.3 billion light years, and the circumference is four billion. Astronomers pay attention to the fact that if you look closely, it is not even quite a ring, but a spiral, that is, the resulting line twists a little. And scientists still don’t know what to attribute all this to.
They began to think, for example, whether this could be some consequence of an interesting phenomenon that, according to cosmologists, took place during the very early Universe, that is, about 13 billion years ago. This phenomenon is called baryon acoustic oscillations.
The point is that the newborn Universe was filled with a kind of continuous “smog” of newly appeared matter, but in this “smog” clumps began to appear – denser areas. It is in them that galaxies are then formed. But at that moment it was like this: gravity gradually pulls more and more matter into this clump, and meanwhile inside the clump there is some energetic interaction between the particles that creates pressure.
Thus, this pressure from the inside counteracts the external gravitational one. And scientists calculated that the roar of this confrontation was heard in the Universe: acoustic sound waves diverged from the center of the clot, like circles on water.
But in the end, astrophysicists came to the conclusion that such sound waves could not lead to the formation of such galactic structures: they simply could not reach such sizes. And most importantly, these waves propagated not in circles, but in spheres.
Therefore, other explanations are required. Moreover, scientists come to the conclusion that this mysterious Big Ring will help us get closer to a better understanding of the structure of the Universe. For example, they are considering the concept proposed by the famous physicist Roger Penrose.
According to this concept, the Big Bang occurs when the previous Universe, which has completely exhausted itself, loses its last particles of matter, its last photons, becomes completely empty and, thus, goes “into nothingness.” That is, everything repeats itself endlessly.
Scientists write that the Ring and Arc may be a “signal” in favor of this version. True, it is not specified why such galactic rings should be obtained in such a “repeating” Universe.
Finally, the possibility of the influence of the so-called cosmic strings is also being considered. String theory states that any kind of quantum particles (of which all matter we understand is composed) is a certain “note”, the result of one or another vibration of invisible strings permeating the cosmos. And there is an opinion that these strings also affect the large-scale structure of the Universe.
