Mega-ring structure in space puzzles researchers

The Great Ring is located 9.2 billion light years away from our Earth and is therefore not visible to the naked eye. This is the second megastructure discovered by researchers led by Alexia Lopez of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in England. Two years ago they also found the Big Arc in the sky.

Remarkably, the Great Ring and the Giant Arc, which are even 3.3 billion light-years across, are in the same cosmological neighborhood. They can be seen at the same distance and in the same cosmic time and are only twelve degrees apart in the sky. Both structures are so large that they challenge our understanding of the universe, scientists say.

The megastructure is actually spiral-shaped
Although the Great Ring appears to be almost perfectly circular, further research by Lopez’s team reveals that the megastructure is spiral-shaped, like a corkscrew with its front pointed toward Earth. The Giant Arc (red in the image above) appears as a huge, almost symmetrical crescent of galaxies in the distant universe.

“Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easily explained with our current understanding of the universe,” Lopez said on the UCLan website. “Their extreme sizes, striking shapes and cosmological proximity must surely tell us something important – but what exactly?” says the researcher.

Huge structures have been discovered several times
Similar large structures have been discovered several times. These include the Sloan Great Wall, which spans 1.5 billion light-years, or the South Pole Wall, which stretches 1.4 billion light-years. However, the largest single structure astronomers have identified to date is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. This is the largest known connected structure in the universe to date and is approximately ten billion light-years long.