Astronomers have found a mind-bogglingly large structure — so big it takes light 10 billion years to traverse — in a distant part of the universe.
The discovery poses a conundrum to a fundamental tenet of modern cosmology, which posits that matter should appear to be distributed uniformly if viewed at a large enough scale.
NEWS: Scientists Discover Universe's Largest Structure
"It's a great tracer of where something was," astronomer Jon Hakkila, with the College of Charleston in South Carolina, told Discovery News.
“We’re treating each (gamma ray burst) source as if it’s a pin in the map and it’s sticking to something,” Hakkila said.
After accounting for potential survey biases — such as NASA's Swift telescope and other gamma ray trackers looking more often in one part of the sky or another — scientists found a region roughly 10 billion light-years away in the direction of the constellations Hercules and Corona Borealis that had a disproportionate number of gamma ray bursts.
“This is probably a large concentration of galaxy clusters and other normal matter,” co-investigator Istvan Horvath, with the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
Additional monitoring of gamma ray bursts should provide more evidence for the structure’s existence.
For now, Horvath says he has “no idea” how something that big could have evolved.
The research appears in the online archive arXiv.org (arXiv:1311.1104 [astro-ph.CO]).
