Astronomers Find Anomaly That Defies Understanding of the Universe
A new discovery in space may make us rethink everything we know about the universe.
Scientists at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, have discovered a giant arc—an extremely large crescent structure of galaxies in distant space. Ph.D. candidate Alexia Lopez, who made the discovery, said, “It’s so big that it’s hard to explain with our current theories.”
The Cosmological Principle states that the universe is homogenous and isotropic, meaning the universe looks the same in all orientations. So how does the giant arc challenge our way of thinking about the universe?
Astronomer and Gaia News contributor Marc D’Antonio said, “this giant arc is really interesting because we’ve seen large-scale structures before in the universe, but nothing of this size. The proportion of this is something that’s actually outside our understanding of current cosmology.”
“What’s interesting about that is, this particular arc, it’s about 9.2 billion light-years away from us, and it’s about 3.4 billion light-years in size. Now keep in mind, that’s a good fraction of the size of the known universe, which is somewhere in the order of 91 or 92 billion light-years in diameter.”
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