A 1.3B-light-year-across ring of galaxies has confounded astronomers

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/giant-structure-space-universe/

by geox • 2 years ago

298 201 2 years ago

cosmosmagazine.com

sshb• 2 years ago

Reminded me of the circles in the sky method that might help studying the topological structure of the universe.

https://mphitchman.com/geometry/section8-3.html

(I think I read about it first in “The shape of space” book)

boxed2• 2 years ago

I mean.. you would expect to see rings sometimes if this is a random noise kind of distribution no?

sapling-ginger• 2 years ago

Supposedly if you scan the sky long enough, you'd find a copy of Shakespeare's play written in the stars.

0xedd• 2 years ago

Why? It's not random.

The_Colonel3• 2 years ago

The upper estimate of the number of galaxies in the observable universe is 2 trillion, which is far too few to find Shakespeare written with "galaxy dots".

roenxi2• 2 years ago

Yeah, maybe. Certainly a theory. But that artist impression has 24 dots, so the odds of getting a circle might be the same as getting a well drawn rabbit, or a "lol :)" (pencilling it out 24 dots seems reasonable for a "lol :)").

But the fact we got a circle rather than something funny suggests it is probably a phenomenon that causes circles responsible. Circles are far more common in nature than statistics might suggest. Nature well knows circles.

boxed2• 2 years ago

I mean.. this could be a circle just from our point of view if the distance measurements are off for a bunch of them...

mr_mitm4• 2 years ago

Yes, that is why the scientists did a statistical analysis, otherwise it wouldn't be worthy of publication. From the arXiv paper:

Using the Convex Hull of Member Spheres (CHMS) algorithm, we estimate that the annulus and inner absorbers of the BR have departures from random expectations, at the density of the control field, of up to 5.2σ.

5 sigma is the gold standard at which we can safely exclude the noise explanation.

Lammy1• 2 years ago

The artist impression in the article is heavily misleading IMHO. The actual "ring" is much more jagged and looks very similar to all the nearby so called "filaments" they labeled. I'm not sure if it's crossing the threshold from constellation-ism to real astronomy. Download the arXiv paper and see for yourself.

pwatsonwailes5• 2 years ago

Structures yes, but not at this sort of scale. For reasons*, there's a soft limit on the scale that you'd expect structures** to scale to. There's no technical reason why they can't get bigger, it just becomes spectacularly unlikely that you'd ever get one. The fact that we've found two so far means 1. There's probably more we haven't found yet, and thus they're probably*** more common than we'd expect, and 2. There may be some mechanism we don't yet understand which leads to the emergence of astronomical structures at this sort of scale.

* Actually quite interesting reasons, but which take a lot of maths to explain that I'm not going in to here.

** In this case, defined as a thing or set of things in a mathematically simple shape - spheres, rings etc.

*** Assuming any bit of the universe is roughly like any other bits, and we didn't just happen to fluke on literally the only place where these exist, and there's two.

fsloth• 2 years ago

Can you give references on the *reasons? Would love to try to do some maths reading in a long while.

moralestapia10• 2 years ago

but which take a lot of maths to explain that I'm not going in to here

Yeah, bs.

Provide sources to support you argument, that's entry level discourse.

valval• 2 years ago

Wait till they find a grouping of galaxies of a phallic shape.

Towaway69• 2 years ago

The giant red arc in the image has a certain similarity.

hprotagonist• 2 years ago

“The Long Man describes what is possibly a collection of three burial mounds, the middle one oblong and the ones to the sides round, quite frankly, in a suggestive arrangement that Nanny Ogg approves of. If geography could talk, this bit of it would be boasting: the whole landscape saying "I've got a great big tonker"”

denton-scratch3• 2 years ago

9.2 billion light-years from Earth
cosmological neighbours

These structures are more than halfway across the observable Universe. It's ludicrous to claim that they are neighbours.

kuschku2• 2 years ago

The circle and the arc are cosmological neighbours to one another, not to us.

They are close enough to each other.

denton-scratch3• 2 years ago

Fair enough; but the article doesn't mention how close together they are. Judging from the diagram, they're separated by an angular distance roughly the same size as the larger structure; so about 3 billion LY.

namenotrequired• 2 years ago

They're saying the Big Ring is a neighbor not of earth, but of the "giant arc of galaxies" which "appears in the same region of sky at the same distance from Earth as the Big Ring".

incognito124• 2 years ago

Strong Expanse vibes

ur-whale• 2 years ago

Time to revisit Larry Niven's work I think.

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

Try Stephen Baxter, if we're working on these sorts of scales.

ganzuul6• 2 years ago

If the ring rotated, and black hole density decreases with size (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71eUes30gwc), could a rotating Gödel universe exist within our universe?

Could a region of space be engineered to allow for a limited form of time travel?

pwatsonwailes5• 2 years ago

No, is the short answer. What you'd need is space-time rotating, not something physical rotating. If you could make the things rotate because space-time was rotating, not because they were, then yes, but there's no mechanism we know of which could do that.

ganzuul6• 2 years ago

Are you familiar with the equations? I'm not prepared to simply take your word for it.

In short, this seems to say the exact opposite of your claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_solution

tomthe• 2 years ago

I agree with the no, but you can make space itself rotate because things in space rotate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame-dragging And that in turn would rotate things in space... or not?

matja• 2 years ago

Similar to the plot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Baxter_novel)

ganzuul6• 2 years ago

Yes, though the Kurtzgesagt video seems to allow for a Kerr metric to be habitable in a very normal sense.

Brajeshwar3• 2 years ago

Please be un-natural and custom-made.

Aardwolf• 2 years ago

Too bad a ring is still too easy to get created naturally. If it would have had the shape of a square, or a dogecoin, that'd get really interesting

Galatians4_163• 2 years ago

< monks, chanting >

Brajeshwar3• 2 years ago

Fifth Element!

barbequeer2• 2 years ago

custom made arrangement of galaxies??

Brajeshwar3• 2 years ago

Aliens - custom-made. I didn't want to say man-made!

elorant• 2 years ago

This can’t be alien-made. That’s 9.2 billion years old. The universe was too young back then to allow life to evolve. Not only that, but for a civilization to reach that kind of technological level it could easily have taken them another billion years.

phire• 2 years ago

I don't think we can rule it out.

The current universe conditions have existed for about 12.8 billion years, and while it might have taken 4.5 billion years for vertebrates to evolve on earth, other planets might have taken faster paths to self-awareness.

I figure an "intelligent sludge" could easily have evolved within a billion years of planet formation. Something that wasn't even fully multicellular, but could work together to produce intelligence in a community of loosely connected homogeneous cells. And if that lifeform gained the ability to intelligently manipulate its own DNA (or equivalent), it could bypass the whole next stages of evolution. Or it could go straight for technology.

mr_toad2• 2 years ago

The oldest stars would have been 4.5 billion years old by then.

ungamedplayer• 2 years ago

Its a smiley face being drawn in progress.

petepete• 2 years ago

Possibly an owl.

donbox• 2 years ago

Or an eye. Almost.

breck• 2 years ago

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07591

jen729w• 2 years ago

My partner, mocking: “they found heaven!”

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

Ring of galaxies? That's puppeteers traversing the space...

kevindamm• 2 years ago

A Klemperer rosette of galaxies instead of planets? That would be more impressive than a ringworld.

davedx• 2 years ago

It's obviously a Kardashev Type III[1] civilization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

iiio8• 2 years ago

It's not just one galaxy. It's a ring of galaxies.

wrsh072• 2 years ago

I'm reading Stephen Webb's book (If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY), and he describes how a partial Dyson sphere can turn a star into a spaceship which blew my mind (just cover all but one side, the released energy will push it the other direction). Imagine doing that at the Galactic scale.

Sharlin2• 2 years ago

Type IV or V, more like.

astral_drama• 2 years ago

Adjust some galaxies in the early timeline and changes would appear downstream as if they were always there. For affected lifeforms, these structures (e.g. a smiley face or whathaveyou) would appear upon waking in the present morning to the data, yet when the affected search their memories, the structure would have always been there.

Unlikely configurations could be interpreted as communication from beings more advanced than typically imagined, or as cosmic engineering projects, or perhaps more likely, the shape of the universe is just different than previously imagined.

pfdietz2• 2 years ago

While I doubt that explanation will hold, it is true that cosmological distances are where we should be looking for ET civilizations, as at those distances one can avoid the Fermi argument (although such a discovery would be pretty firm evidence we'll never achieve FTL travel.)

andrewflnr4• 2 years ago

I don't know, cosmological distances might be too early for biological life to form and evolve intelligence and expand across galaxies. My understanding is that there weren't necessarily enough of the basic chemicals of life formed until relatively recently. (Phosphorus particularly is a problem, I'm less sure about the others) And doing anything visible across light years also takes a long time, especially if FTL is impossible, which it almost certainly is.

hinkley• 2 years ago

Or a weird lens effect. Gravitational lensing has a logarithmic effect doesn’t it? Theres the old joke about fitting a line to log scale data with a fat enough pen. These galaxies aren’t perfectly circular to each other.

I think the fact that the arc has a similar focus to the ring is going to turn out to be something.

anonymousiam• 2 years ago

This was my first thought also, and there's no mention of whether or not this possibility has been investigated.

intrasight2• 2 years ago

Cool insight. Anyone with more knowledge care to weigh in? Some supermassive dark matter there? Also, on what timeframe might this change if so? Note to self to Google this topic in a year.

hoseja• 2 years ago

Fairy ring.

andyjohnson04• 2 years ago

Interesting article. I'm not an astronomer, or any kind of scientist, but I tried perusing the paper anyway. What I expected to find was some indication that the stars in question are aligned on a plane - rather than being varying distances [1] from our pov and only looking like a ring to us. Is this information present and I missed it?

My other thought, with all respect to the expertise of the scientists involved, is that when we observe the universe at this massive scale it may be inevitable that structures will just appear out of the data, even with very high statistical significance. I don't know if this is a scientifically defensible position to take though.

Again - I'm not a scientist and I don't know what I'm talking about. Just musing, but interested in the opinions of others more informed than me.

[1] I'm aware that determining distance over cosmological distances is very difficult

Sharlin2• 2 years ago

stars

Galaxies. And determining the approx relative distance of distant galaxies is in fact easy thanks to cosmological redshift (the z values the article refers to). Anyway, given the number of galaxies in the ring, being at different distances but their projections just happening to form a rough circle would be even more astonishing than the galaxies in fact sharing a causal history due to some unknown early-universe mechanism.

The article also mentions that either the circle or the arc in itself could be just a statistical coincidence – as long as we dok’t find more such structures – but the existence of both the circle and the arc, in the same part of the sky, is highly suspicious.

andyjohnson04• 2 years ago

Woops. Yes, galaxies. Too late to edit.

Anyway, given the number of galaxies in the ring, being at different distances but their projections just happening to form a rough circle would be even more astonishing than the galaxies in fact sharing a causal history due to some unknown early-universe mechanism.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Why would it be "more astonishing" than an actual causal connection? Surely astronomers are more interested in causal connections than observational coincidences?

To illustrate: the stars making up the constellation of Norma [1] form a rough square when seen from earth, but as their distances from Earth vary greatly this is just an illusion caused by Earth's relative orientation to them. Given the Copernican principle (which I accept is not a physical law) I'm struggling to see why a group of galaxies that form a circle only when seen from "near" earth [2] are actually cosmologically significant.

I accept that the ring contains more than four galaxies, and this makes the ring more statistically significant than a square of galaxies. But it still implies a privileged viewpoint in order for it to be actually significant. I still have the gut feeling that this potential significance is more than offset by the enormously greater observational scale.

tl/dr: why is this more than just naming a new constellation?

(Just to re-iterate: I'm interested in understanding the errors in my mental model - and I'm not trying to poke holes in the work of scientists more qualified them me.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_(constellation)

[2] And also, I guess, from a similar point on the other "side" of the ring

stouset5• 2 years ago

Looking at the angular size of the region in question, it surely would have to be that they’re equidistant from us in order to be at all interesting. There should be innumerable galaxies in and around the ring, from our perspective.

stainablesteel• 2 years ago

here's a picture from her presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwRJGaIcX6A&t=173s

moralestapia10• 2 years ago

To be honest it's not clear if it's from our point of view or not, since they don't mention it explicitly in the paper, but it seems to be the case since they start from observations made by the Apache Point Observatory, which is on Earth ...

If you think about it, it doesn't matter which point of view it works on, if the thing is an actual circle that's interesting on its own, or presumably a sphere(?) but they don't even touch on that because "3D is hard"? Anyway, for some reason they implicitly choose our point of view as the "interesting one", funny (/s, actually lame and sad) to see the geocentric model is still alive after two millennia!

They also didn't check if other stars would form circles from any arbitrary point of view (how many circles are actually up there, not just the apparent ones), which would be a trivial calculation, but I guess "matrix transformations are hard" as well?

The whole paper is pretty weak. They calculate the "thickness" of this "circle", i.e. the distance from the galaxy closest to us to the galaxy further from us if you undo the projection; and they come up with a value of ~400 Megaparsecs. Now, you may be inclined to think "yeah, but the universe is HUGE and on that scale they may be kind of tighly packed?". Nope! It's on the order of the largest (actual) cosmological structures that we have identified, so, pretty much, they are as further away as they can be from each other, lol.

This is pretty much astrology.

Source: I read the paper.

MetaWhirledPeas• 2 years ago

To be honest it's not clear if it's from our point of view or not, since they don't mention it explicitly in the paper, but it seems to be the case since they start from observations made by the Apache Point Observatory, which is on Earth

Would the perspective difference be significant even if it were far out into the solar system?

lelanthran4• 2 years ago

Anyway, for some reason they implicitly choose our point of view as the "interesting one", funny (/s, actually lame and sad) to see the geocentric model is still alive after two millennia!
They also didn't check if other stars would form circles from any arbitrary point of view (how many circles are actually up there, not just the apparent ones),

I think (not sure of the proof) that any set of points that form a circle from a specific PoV would, from any arbitrary PoV form a regular shape (ellipse) or a straight line.

So we can probably tell if any group of stars/galaxies/bright-lights-in-the-sky form a "structure" (i.e. a regular shape).

spdustin2• 2 years ago

I would argue that your keen interest in learning more about natural things that are mysterious to you by asking questions and doing research literally makes you a scientist.

Not a professional one in the field, sure. But scientist? Most assuredly.

xutopia• 2 years ago

Carl Sagan would agree. In his book The Demon Haunted World he explains science in very similar terms as you. He also gives examples of primitive humans doing science.

andyjohnson04• 2 years ago

Thank you!

GeoAtreides• 2 years ago

But is he doing research? Has he read on the Cosmological Principle? Maybe some reading on what standard deviation (5.2σ on this paper) is and what it means to things being naturally random? How about reading the original paper? The Discussion section makes it very, very clear how the scientists reached the conclusion and how the Big Ring is statistically significant -- and in the process literally answering OP's question.

lelanthran4• 2 years ago

Not a professional one in the field, sure. But scientist? Most assuredly.

Of course he's not a professional scientist!!!

To be one you have to partake in academic politics, with its legendarily low stakes, in a publish or perish environment ... for little more than minimum-wage.

sandworm101• 2 years ago

If they are in a ring, equidistant, then whatever caused their arrangement would be local and roughly the same size/shape. But if there are at varying distances, then they would be arranged into a cone, a cone pointing directly at our galaxy. That would be a much more massive structure and, frankly, rather terrifying.

lelanthran4• 2 years ago

I don't think you have to add a disclaimer that you're not a scientist to (what looks to me to be) not-unreasonable speculations.

I mean, even if you were a scientist[1], odds are good you're not that kind of scientist.

Sort of like "I'm not a lawyer, but even if I were, I'm not YOUR lawyer."

[1] I was a scientist, and but not this kind of scientist, so your musings look just as plausible, if not more, than my own would.

michae4• 2 years ago

from Figure 1 (page 5 of the PDF) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.07591:

The tangent-plane distribution of Mg II absorbers in the redshift slice z = 0.802 ± 0.060.

the ring is visible in the slice, which corresponds to a distance range based on those redshift values and cosmological parameters. I think this is effectively a spherical shell of a certain thickness.

igtztorrero• 2 years ago

Pi constant appears again

willis936• 2 years ago

The Cosmological Principle has been suspect for a long time. It just adds so little value and costs so much to our understanding of the universe. Best to stick to provable things.

mr_mitm4• 2 years ago

Little value? It's one of the assumptions that lead us to the prediction of the CMB which we then found. It's proved very fruitful, I'd say. Without the cosmological principle, modern cosmology is a complete non-starter. I'm not aware of any serious theories whatsoever that even attempt to explain anything without the cosmological principle or at least an approximation thereof.

andrewflnr4• 2 years ago

I recall the CMB being found accidentally, and then becoming evidence for the big bang. You don't need cosmological homogeneity to predict the CMB.

scaglio• 2 years ago

*The Three-Body Problem intensifies*

Galatians4_163• 2 years ago

Oh give me a locus, where the gravitons focus, and the three-body problem is solved… [1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRns6u5bHuw

moralestapia10• 2 years ago

Within 2 trillion galaxies and 10^24 stars, it would be statistically rare not to find any arrangement following a shape that's familiar to us.

ojosilva• 2 years ago

I found a enlightening yet brief conference Alexia López gave on the Big Ring discovery:

https://youtu.be/fwRJGaIcX6A?t=173

Here's an in-depth seminar on the findings of the Giant Arc in the Sky, her work prior to the Big Ring discovery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zkGk6EPMC8

She was also featured in a pop-sci BBC Four documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S36MqEzUzIw

Unfortunately all videos are of quite bad quality, but the explanations are a good introduction to the work.

venusenvy472• 2 years ago

That last video, at about 3:55, shows the ring as a bunch of red balls surrounded by a bunch of blue balls. All the balls seem randomly distributed, but a small subset are colored red. I wonder what makes those balls different? There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about their arrangement, other than they chose to color them red.

gmuslera• 2 years ago

Could we be watching in the wrong direction? Finding patterns where there is random noise is one of our characteristics. Or something closer than distorts our view of that region.

In the other hand, complexity sometimes lead to unexpected regularities, maybe things were not so even around the Big Bang.

throwup238• 2 years ago

Does anyone know how fast the big ring in the sky keeps on turning?

barbequeer2• 2 years ago

a year or more

spdustin2• 2 years ago

I don't know where I'll be tomorrow, but I understood your reference today.

lelanthran4• 2 years ago

Interesting journey.

layer8• 2 years ago

That’s clearly a Cyclops smiley face.

Or a weak wifi signal.

codelikeawolf• 2 years ago

It's obviously the result of a construction project by a hitherto unknown Type IV civilization on the Kardashev scale. /s

markus_zhang2• 2 years ago

Do we have a guess what does the ring look like X million/billion years ago?

undersuit• 2 years ago

Yes, we have direct observations. /s

The light we are viewing now was emitted billions of years ago, we don't know what it looks like today.

profsummergig• 2 years ago

Something so key to the news, and yet not mentioned in this article.

The ring we see is how it looked 9 billion years ago. The universe is 14 billion years old. So, when the universe was still a baby.

markus_zhang2• 2 years ago

Sorry I meant to say...eh...maybe something from a few decades ago so to capture tiny changes.

qD29Lno-oKXPLEv• 2 years ago

This is pretty incredible...I honestly would be facinated to find out what sort of early universe event might have precipitated such a massive structure

Nifty3929• 2 years ago

Is this the center of the universe then? Maybe the big band originated from the center of that ring.

astrostl• 2 years ago

The universe is not believed to have a center.

ajmurmann• 2 years ago

The big bang was everywhere. Space itself was created by the big bang. It's not like a bomb going off in space somewhere even though that's more intuitive to imagine.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years ago

Looks like Galactic Union )

Joel_Mckay• 2 years ago

It is a weird structure because it is a helix, and not a ring.

Dr. Becky covers these sorts of phenomena in an accessible format:

https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos

ThouYS• 2 years ago

I'm not an astronomer either, but pretty sure if I generated uniformly random points on the scale of number of visible galaxys, I could find a circle in there

dan_mctree• 2 years ago

Pretty sure you wouldn't find many circles containing galaxies all at a similar approximate distance

There might be some, so it could be lucky and just random chance, but the stats seem to say that it's very unlikely

moonlion_eth• 2 years ago

that people refuse to accept that it is a structure and not mirage formed by a privileged angle gives homage to its statistical improbability

riskable• 2 years ago

Wild speculation: It's the result of another universe poking into our own, forcing a bunch of galaxies near the center point to spread out in a circular fashion.

GioM• 2 years ago

More wild speculation: an expansion point in the previous universe, centred perfectly on a quark-antiquark pair.

intrasight2• 2 years ago

and more: simulation artifact

bosquefrio• 2 years ago

This is obviously cosmic graffiti. Damn kids.

M95D• 2 years ago

Looks like Niven was thinking too small when he imagined Fleet of Worlds being made of just 5 stars.

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

Niven walked so that Baxter could run.

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

Ah, good, we've finally found Boulder's Ring. Weird that it's not in the middle of the Great Attractor, but maybe this was just the Xeelee's prototype.

mvkel• 2 years ago

Rings imply orbit. Could they be orbiting around an insanely-large unseen black hole?

A 1.3B-light-year-across ring of galaxies has confounded astronomers

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