[HN Gopher] A 1.3B-light-year-across ring of galaxies has confou...
___________________________________________________________________
A 1.3B-light-year-across ring of galaxies has confounded
astronomers
Author : geox
Score : 231 points
Date : 2024-05-27 06:32 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cosmosmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cosmosmagazine.com)
| sshb wrote:
| 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)
| boxed wrote:
| I mean.. you would expect to see rings sometimes if this is a
| random noise kind of distribution no?
| sapling-ginger wrote:
| Supposedly if you scan the sky long enough, you'd find a copy
| of Shakespeare's play written in the stars.
| 0xedd wrote:
| Why? It's not random.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| 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".
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| boxed wrote:
| I mean.. this could be a circle just from our point of view
| if the distance measurements are off for a bunch of them...
| roenxi wrote:
| Why would it matter if that were true or not?
| mr_mitm wrote:
| 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 5.2s.
|
| 5 sigma is the gold standard at which we can safely exclude the
| noise explanation.
| Lammy1 wrote:
| 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.
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can you give references on the *reasons? Would love to try to
| do some maths reading in a long while.
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| If you want to do some research on the subject, you're
| looking for violations of homogeneity, as implied by the
| Lambda-CDM model of the universe. The lambda in this case
| is the cosmological constant. You'll need to read up on
| that too.
|
| The shortest, simplest way I can think to explain it is
| that we expect the universe to look alike, anywhere we
| look. Think of it like a biopsy - we assume that anywhere
| we look should be much like anywhere else, because there's
| no reason to think any area of the universe has special
| conditions where physics plays by different rules.
|
| That sets up some implications around what we think the
| universe should look like, at different scales. However, we
| recently have been running into structures which are bigger
| than we'd expect.
|
| Where we get into the maths is to do with the value of the
| cosmological constant. We currently think it's positive,
| because the universe is expanding, and its rate of
| expansion is accelerating. To look into the maths for this,
| have a Google around the maths behind the accelerating
| expansion of the universe.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| If you follow the link from this article to the preprint,
| you'll find some explanations, references to other papers,
| as well as enough terminology to do some Googling.
|
| Have fun! It's quite interesting.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yeah, read the site guidelines, yo.
|
| I actually read the article, as you can see by the other
| comments I've made, and found none of that, but please
| feel free to correct me and cite here the portions of the
| paper where that is mentioned.
|
| And sure, I could specialize in cosmology and find out
| the reasons on my own, but also, the burden of proof on
| that argument is not on me.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Introduction, paragraph 2:
|
| > _The multiple discoveries of LSSs made throughout the
| past few decades are well known to challenge our
| understanding of the Standard Cosmological Model (LCDM)
| [2, 8-12], in particular due to a possible violation of a
| fundamental assumption, the Cosmological Principle (CP),
| which states that our Universe is both homogeneous and
| isotropic on large scales_
|
| That gives you a couple papers and a few terms that you
| can get started with. Unless your goal is to argue,
| instead of learn, which it seems like it might be.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Context, as it seems to have been missed:
|
| >For reasons*, there's a soft limit on the scale that
| you'd expect structures** to scale to.
|
| The content you cited acknowledges the premise of the
| Cosmological Principle, but it does not say anything
| about what these "reasons" could be.
|
| So, nope, that's not an adequate argument.
|
| Again, I could waste my time on a PhD in Cosmology to
| come back and actually make a good argument for why
| homogeneity in structure is favored at large cosmological
| scales ... but why should I? I didn't bring that
| particular argument into the conversation [1].
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philoso
| phy)
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _So, nope, that 's not an adequate argument._
|
| I'm not trying to argue, lol. You're asking for more
| information but in such a weirdly aggressive way.
|
| The reason there is a soft limit (in our current
| theories) is _because_ of the cosmological principle
|
| Big lol at the wiki linking of burden of proof. Not every
| conversation is an argument, holy.
|
| As much as I love HN, this type of aggressiveness and
| desire to converse as if defending a dissertation can get
| bloody exhausting.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >The reason there is a soft limit (in our current
| theories) is because of the cosmological principle
|
| What? That's a circular argument.
|
| HN is definitely not the place for "me vs. you" grudges,
| so I stick to making arguments and try to drive the
| conversation forward, however,
|
| >Have fun! It's quite interesting.
|
| >Unless your goal is to argue, instead of learn, [...]
|
| >Big lol at the wiki linking of burden of proof.
|
| You don't seem to be the one arguing in good faith,
| though. "You're being aggressive", laughable.
| ziddoap wrote:
| My "Have fun!" was genuine, I had a lot of fun learning
| about this stuff despite not pursuing a PhD in cosmology.
| Anton Petrov covers this specific topic in a few videos,
| as well as other large structures, and it's truly
| fascinating.
|
| The rest was probably a bit uncalled for, you're right. I
| was immediately put on edge by "Yeah, read the site
| guidelines, yo." (which, uhh, not sure how that is
| focused on moving the conversation forward but lets leave
| it at we were both touchy!)
| valval wrote:
| Wait till they find a grouping of galaxies of a phallic shape.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| The giant red arc in the image has a certain similarity.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "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-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| The circle and the arc are cosmological neighbours _to one
| another_ , not _to us_.
|
| They are close enough to _each other_.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| If you've got two structures of size X, with a distance of
| X between them as well, that's relatively close.
|
| That's as if Paris had a second Eiffel tower three blocks
| away.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yeah, that makes sense if Paris is just 15 blocks across,
| and the Eiffel Tower is a couple of blocks wide, and
| there's nothing (observable) outside Paris.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| And that doesn't even mean they are really close between
| them linearly.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Strong Expanse vibes
| ur-whale wrote:
| Time to revisit Larry Niven's work I think.
| ganzuul wrote:
| If the ring rotated, and black hole density decreases with size
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71eUes30gwc), could a rotating
| Godel universe exist within our universe?
|
| Could a region of space be engineered to allow for a limited form
| of time travel?
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| 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.
| ganzuul wrote:
| 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
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| You're on the wrong thing there. I could be wrong but I
| think you're outside your field on this one.
| ganzuul wrote:
| It says that spacetime exists as an interaction of
| gravity alone. This implies that there is no other frame
| of reference in this type of solution to GR. i.e. without
| mass there is no time in such a universe. Not a new idea.
|
| > I could be wrong but I think you're outside your field
| on this one.
|
| And in contrast what would that make of you??
|
| I'm saying that if there in some point in the future
| (because we can see it now) is sufficient mass density in
| the region of space of that big ring, and it is rotating,
| we tick every box we know of to theoretically allow for
| an eternal circle. "Engineering" it would mean that
| someone _wanted_ some type of eternal existence, which is
| the profound idea at play here.
|
| Engineering things without the technology to manufacture
| it happens all the time. Just because we can't imagine
| how to build it does not mean we can't calculate if it
| could exist.
| qsi wrote:
| Where in the Wikipedia page does it seem say so? I can't
| find anything relevant but then again I don't understand
| all of it.
| ganzuul wrote:
| > A perfect and pressureless fluid can be interpreted as
| a model of a configuration of dust particles that locally
| move in concert and interact with each other only
| gravitationally, from which the name is derived.
|
| That "only" is important but unintuitive. It means space
| and time can not be separated from mass.
| tomthe wrote:
| 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?
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| The Lense-Thirring effect is absolutely a thing, and we
| have direct evidence for it. To be clearer (I totally
| wasn't clear enough on this tbf), there's nothing we know
| of which can do it _at the required scale_ to allow for
| time travel.
|
| What we're talking about here are closed timelike curves.
| There's models which suggest they could exist inside a
| singularity, but they're not going to outside without
| something which seriously breaks other areas of physics
| (Tipler cylinders etc).
| ganzuul wrote:
| > There's models which suggest they could exist inside a
| singularity, but they're not going to outside without
| something which seriously breaks other areas of physics
| (Tipler cylinders etc).
|
| A singularity is a dimensionless point. It has no inside.
| Did you mean a black hole? If so, the Kurtzgesagt cartoon
| explains this.
|
| The second part of you sentence seems to have a broken
| sentence structure. Can't make sense of it.
| tempestn wrote:
| To clarify the rest of the sentence for you:
|
| ...but [closed time-like curves are] not going to [exist]
| outside [of a singularity] without something which
| seriously breaks other areas of physics (Tipler cylinders
| etc. [are examples of such theoretical instances which
| would break other areas of physics]).
| matja wrote:
| Similar to the plot of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Baxter_novel)
| ganzuul wrote:
| Yes, though the Kurtzgesagt video seems to allow for a Kerr
| metric to be habitable in a very normal sense.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Please be un-natural and custom-made.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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_16 wrote:
| < monks, chanting >
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Fifth Element!
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| And Halo...
| barbequeer wrote:
| custom made arrangement of galaxies??
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Aliens - custom-made. I didn't want to say man-made!
| elorant wrote:
| 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.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| Its a smiley face being drawn in progress.
| petepete wrote:
| Possibly an owl.
| donbox wrote:
| Or an eye. Almost.
| breck wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07591
| jen729w wrote:
| My partner, mocking: "they found heaven!"
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Ring of galaxies? That's puppeteers traversing the space...
| kevindamm wrote:
| A Klemperer rosette of galaxies instead of planets? That would
| be more impressive than a ringworld.
| davedx wrote:
| It's obviously a Kardashev Type III[1] civilization.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
| iiio8 wrote:
| It's not just one galaxy. It's a _ring of galaxies_.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| >just cover all but one side, the released energy will push
| it the other direction
|
| What is to stop the star from just crashing into the
| sphere?
| wrsh07 wrote:
| In the book he discusses the shkadov thruster which
| reflects the energy so the shell would move, too.
|
| Obviously if it's not reflective you could absorb the
| energy and use it as needed
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
| Sharlin wrote:
| Type IV or V, more like.
| astral_drama wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.)
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's all true, to some extent, but at least it's not
| ruled out by Fermi.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| hoseja wrote:
| Fairy ring.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| 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
| Sharlin wrote:
| > 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.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| 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
| _xerces_ wrote:
| I think of it in terms of degrees of freedom and
| statistical likelihood. If I throw a bunch of marbles on
| the floor and a few of them form a interesting shape that
| is one thing as they can only move on a plane. If I throw
| them in the air it is less likely to form a circle as now
| they are free to move in multiple directions and are not
| constrained to the plane. If 4 of those marbles align that
| is less likely than 20 of them happening to do so in a
| recognizable shape. 20 marbles in the air, each one being
| in just the right place relative to the 19 others in order
| to look like a circle when they can be in any position in
| space (vs. limited to a flat plane) is exceedingly
| unlikely.
|
| Even more unlikely is that an arc appears next to the ring,
| that would make me start to wonder if something is
| affecting the marbles I throw into the sky.
| financypants wrote:
| Is it less likely even if we can view the marbles in the
| air from any angle?
| mannykannot wrote:
| It does not seem very plausible that professional
| astronomers have _twice_ made this rookie mistake and no-
| one has noticed yet. Furthermore, if they were just doing
| what amounts to drawing circles and lines on a map of
| galaxies, they could have discovered thousands by now!
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| The rate at which we are collecting data far, far
| outpaces the speed at which it is being analyzed.
|
| There will almost certainly be more discoveries like this
| as we continue surveying the cosmos with increasingly
| sensitive instruments.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Well, yes, but my point is that, if these astronomers are
| finding circles and other structures without doing basic
| checks such as distance, they could find thousands _right
| now,_ using nothing more than a chart of the known
| galaxies - and even bigger ones than they are reporting
| here. Thus, it is not plausible that they are omitting
| these basic checks.
| alfiopuglisi wrote:
| > Woops. Yes, galaxies. Too late to edit.
|
| Not even galaxies, but massive galaxy clusters. The spatial
| smoothing used for the ring image is a 2D gaussian with an
| equivalent width of 11 Mpc, or 37 million light years, big
| enough to contain all the 2000 galaxies in the nearby Virgo
| cluster with room to spare. That's for each point in the
| ring (and that's why they all look so nice and round. These
| astronomers are playing a statistical game where a pixel
| combines information from trillions of stars) It's called
| the Big Ring for a reason. Our own Laniakea supercluster
| [1], whose dimensions are bigger than anyone imagined up to
| a few years ago, can be tiled inside the ring several times
| over.
|
| At that spatial scale, the Universe is supposed to be
| homogeneous. We do not have plausible mechanisms to
| generate structures on such a massive scale.
|
| Regarding your analogy with a constellation, yes you can
| always draw arbitrary squares and triangles among bright
| stars. But if you had 20+ stars arranged in a circle like
| that ring, no one would think it was a chance projection,
| you would demand a physical explanation. We do in fact have
| such a ring around us: the Gould Belt [2], made of young
| stars all around the Sun. It is difficult to recognize
| precisely because we are inside it, and its stars are
| spread all around the sky. And, of course, some kind of
| physical explanation is invoked for this ring as well.
|
| Moreover we do know it's an actual ring, and not some
| chance alignment, because we can derive the distance of
| each point from its redshift, and it turns out that they
| are all quite similar. The authors spend quite a few pages
| describing the 3D ring structure, showing that it's a ring
| only when seen from our direction, and how it would appear
| like an arc or a strange shape from other viewpoints. It
| would still be a kind of overdense structure, but maybe
| more difficult to recognize.
|
| BTW the mechanism used to detect the ring is quite clever:
| it's not a sky image, but rather an absorption map:
| thousands of background quasars provide a sort of uniform
| illumination, and they look where this light is removed by
| clumps of matter.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea_Supercluster
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gould_Belt
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to write such an
| informative response.
| Retric wrote:
| > We do not have plausible mechanisms to generate
| structures on such a massive scale.
|
| Actual structure no. But, random chance can make things
| look like a structure on this scale.
|
| > But if you had 20+ stars arranged in a circle like that
| ring, no one would think it was a chance projection, you
| would demand a physical explanation.
|
| I would generally assume it to be random. In galaxies
| stars move around far to much for any structure from
| their initial formation to remain for long, and forming a
| ring long after creation would just be happenstance.
| pests wrote:
| > I would generally assume it to be random.
|
| But its not, it has structure - it looks like ring or
| arc. The universe should be homologous at this scale.
| Retric wrote:
| Every formation of galaxies has structure.
|
| Random processes can appear to have meaningful structure,
| but that's just because we value some outcomes more than
| others.
|
| > The universe should be homologous at this scale.
|
| That doesn't mean we're going to perceive it as
| homologous. A true random number generator spitting out
| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 would be freaky as fuck to
| see, but that doesn't make it non random.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| This is true, but at this scale, aren't we looking at a
| moderate portion of the visible universe? This is
| hundreds of thousands or millions of galaxies appearing
| with some strong correlation, I believe. There are only a
| few trillion galaxies in the observable universe, so it's
| not like we have 10^20 chances to observe random chance
| correlations like this.
|
| I'm just talking without actually having done a close
| reading or done the statistics for myself, so I could be
| quite wrong.
| Retric wrote:
| Check out the preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.07591
|
| It's less impressive when looking at the background data
| than how it's described.
| beltsazar wrote:
| > Random processes can appear to have meaningful
| structure, but that's just because we value some outcomes
| more than others.
|
| No. It's because some structures are much much _much_
| less likely to form randomly than other structures.
|
| If you throw 1000 dices, is it possible to get all one?
| Yes. Is it likely? Not at all.
|
| Why do planets look like a sphere (approximately)?
| Because that's the most probable shape if things happen
| randomly. If a pyramid-shaped planet was found,
| scientists would freak out. This galaxy ring phenomenon
| is similar to that (but not that crazy).
| moralestapia wrote:
| Finding ~50 dots arranged in a (very loosely defined)
| circle, from any projection, of a dense set of 2 trillion
| of them is _very_ plausible.
|
| Actually, you would have a hard time producing this set
| in such way that no "circles" like that are found at all.
| It would have to be a very artificial distribution of
| points in space for you not to observe this, like all of
| them arranged in a single line, or a giant rectangle,
| idk.
| beltsazar wrote:
| > Finding ~50 dots arranged in a (very loosely defined)
| circle, from any projection, of a dense set of 2 trillion
| of them is very plausible.
|
| It depends on the size of the circle, though. The smaller
| the size, the more likely the probability is. But that's
| only for a particular combination of 50 dots. Now we have
| to average out of all possible circle sizes and all
| combinations of 50 dots. Can someone do the math (or the
| simulation)?
| moralestapia wrote:
| On a first glance it seems so, but ... could it be the
| opposite?
|
| I'm thinking, the larger the space, the larger the number
| of points contained within it, so the larger the
| probability of them being arrange in such way that blah
| blah ...
|
| We need a math guy to chime in. I have a hunch there may
| be a theorem about something like this already.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| > If you throw 1000 dices, is it possible to get all one?
| Yes. Is it likely? Not at all.
|
| That's literally as likely as _any_ other possible
| outcome.
|
| Let's simplfy this to a coin toss, which is more likely:
|
| HHHHHH
|
| or
|
| HHTHTT
|
| or
|
| HTHTHT
|
| They all have the exact same odds of appearing, we might
| just tell ourselves one formation is more special than
| any other.
| beltsazar wrote:
| Of course each instance has the same probability. But
| we're not talking about the probability of an instance,
| but rather that of a set of instances.
|
| In the dice example, it's obvious that the probability of
| getting at least one dice facing two is much more likely
| than the probability of getting all dice facing one.
|
| Similarly, in the planet shape example, I hope you don't
| think that a pyramid-shaped planet is as likely to form
| as a sphere-shaped planet.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| Yes, a large set of instances is more likely than a
| single instance (all things being equal).
|
| However that doesn't mean that a sphere is any more or
| less likely than any specific other structure. It's an
| small but important distinction.
|
| No, a pyramid shaped planet is not as likely to form as a
| sphere shaped pyramid. Definitionally a pyramid shaped
| planet is impossible.
| beltsazar wrote:
| > However that doesn't mean that a sphere is any more or
| less likely than any specific other structure.
|
| A shape/structure doesn't have an intrinsic probability.
| Your sentence is underspecified. Shape of what under what
| process?
|
| In the context of the shape of galaxies, I think we can
| agree that if we found galaxies forming a shape like this
| sentence: "WE ARE COMING", everyone would freak out. So
| yeah, in this context, some shapes are more likely to
| form (randomly) than others.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| > So yeah, in this context, some shapes are more likely
| to form (randomly) than others.
|
| Again I think you are confused. Assuming random
| distribution, 'We Are Coming' is just as likely as any
| other similarly long structure to form. You just happen
| to care about that structure more than others - however
| that doesn't make it more or less likey to form.
|
| That message, in morse code is .-- . / .- .-. . / -.-.
| --- -- .. -. --..
|
| There are 200B to 2T galaxies in the obeservable
| universe. If you found lines of galaxies and interperated
| them as morse code, I'm sure you'd find some interesting
| words/phrases being said.
|
| You'd expect that phrase in every 2^28 = 268,435,456
| random 28 digit binary strings - which is not very many.
| Keep in mind a galaxy could be part of many, many strings
| (different index position, different orientation of
| string).
| pfortuny wrote:
| No: precisely that is the definition of randomness as
| "lack of information " or "incompressibility".
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| HH is just as compressible as HT or TH or TT.
|
| You can easily build a compression scheme for any one of
| these values, but not one that encapsulates all values
| while using less data than the raw values themselves.
| glandium wrote:
| > Why do planets look like a sphere (approximately)?
| Because that's the most probable shape if things happen
| randomly.
|
| That has actually nothing to do with randomness, and
| everything to do with gravity.
| https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/planets-round/en/
| ineptech wrote:
| For any allegedly-random distribution, it's possible to
| statistically determine an upper-limit on the size of
| non-random-appearing structures. The upper limit for such
| structures in our universe is thought to be about 370
| MPc, about 1/3rd of the size of this ring.
|
| A lot of these questions are much more clearly addressed
| in the previous paper by the same authors, which is much
| more layperson-friendly: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/a
| rticle/516/2/1557/6657809?lo...
| btilly wrote:
| Actually I do have a plausible mechanism whose numbers
| have been sanity checked by a couple of cosmologists, but
| has never been published.
|
| Here's the idea. The expansion of the universe is
| currently accelerating. If this continues indefinitely,
| we get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip model.
| What happens if the Big Rip proceeds to the point where a
| lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy gets
| released, and that release stops the Rip by creating the
| next Big Bang? This could form a cycle since the next
| Bang creates cosmos that in turn will Rip.
|
| It doesn't sound entirely crazy to me. The Casimir effect
| shows that you should release vacuum energy when you
| constrain the volume that a particularly bit of space can
| interact with. The incredible expansion of a Rip should
| constrain such interactions. So a large release of vacuum
| energy seems expected. And who knows how releasing vacuum
| energy interacts with the acceleration of the expansion
| of the universe?
|
| Let's do a back of the envelope estimate. Theory
| estimates vacuum energy at something like 10^113 joules
| per cubic meter of vacuum energy. For comparison the
| visible universe is estimated at 10^53 kg. Using
| Einstein's E = mc^2, that's around 10^70 joules. Current
| cosmological models say that at the hottest part of the
| Big Bang, the universe must have already been larger than
| a cubic meter. Yes, there is a lot of energy not in the
| form of visible matter. Even so, there's a lot of room
| for a release of vacuum energy to explain the energy
| density needed at the beginning of a Big Bang.
|
| We at least pass the most basic sanity check.
|
| This would offer interesting answers to some key
| cosmological questions.
|
| Current Big Bang models struggle with how a large volume
| started out very uniform. Inflation has been proposed for
| this, but it has some problems. But in this model,
| extreme uniformity over a large volume is predicted. If
| you add in quantum fluctuations starting the vacuum
| release, that have spread out before we go from Rip to
| Bang, then you can also explain arbitrarily large
| structures in the universe.
|
| This also explains the arrow of time. How could we start
| off with such low entropy when entropy is always
| increasing? Well as the universe expands, entropy
| increases. But volume increases faster. We wind up with a
| giant universe filled with very low entropy/volume. When
| a small piece of that forms a new Big Bang, it again
| starts with very low entropy.
|
| Unfortunately, this involves an insane lack of
| conservation of energy. But GR provides no easy way to
| even state what conservation of energy means. At least
| not outside of limited classes of models. Which this is
| not one of. So the idea of energy not being conserved at
| cosmological scales is at least not entirely
| unprecedented by current theory.
| stouset wrote:
| > But if you had 20+ stars arranged in a circle like that
| ring, no one would think it was a chance projection...
|
| Of course we would? This is absolutely backwards.
|
| A random plot of billions of points will have all sorts
| of coincidental shapes and clusterings. A uniform field
| might look more random but would actually demand
| explanation, as lacking those coincidental clusterings is
| strong evidence for structure.
|
| And as I understand the topic, the scales involved
| preclude those galaxies physically interacting and being
| able to form structure. So they _should_ appear randomly
| distributed.
|
| Edit: To be clear I'm assuming my own ignorance here. I
| presume there _is_ a reason this is significant, I just
| don't understand it. But arguments like yours aren't
| convincing to me because we _should_ expect to see random
| structure, the same way a series of a billion coin flips
| is likely to have a giant run of alternating heads and
| tails.
| vikingerik wrote:
| There is also the multiple-endpoints principle to think
| about. The likelihood of _this particular set_ of galaxies
| forming a ring is very low. The chance of _some_ set of
| galaxies among all the billions in the sky doing this is
| much higher. Then we notice and cherry-pick only the one
| interesting data point, we never notice all the mundane
| ones.
|
| It's always difficult to tell if a popular-science article
| is really describing something unusual or if it's using
| selective perception to create the illusion of one. (I have
| no idea in this case.)
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| It's unusual, at the very least. Because it's relatively
| close to us.
| beltsazar wrote:
| > The chance of some set of galaxies among all the
| billions in the sky doing this is much higher.
|
| Of course in relative terms it's much higher, but it
| doesn't matter--what matters is the absolute value.
| 10^-100 is much larger than 10^-10000, but if something
| with the probability of 10^-100 happens, it's still
| "astonishing."
|
| The probability of a particular planet has a shape of
| pyramid is so low. And yes, the probability of finding
| any planet in the universe that has a shape of pyramid is
| much higher, but still very low. If one was found,
| scientists would freak out.
| szvsw wrote:
| The infinite does not necessarily contain everything. I
| would be surprised to find an even number in an infinite
| list of odd numbers. I would be even more surprised to find
| cantor's diagonalized number in a list of rational numbers.
| And yet even more surprised to find Hamlet encoded within
| Pi.
|
| Structure is still interesting.
|
| In re: the non-causal alignment being even more astonishing
| - a simple argument to illustrate this is to ask- would you
| be more amazed if you threw 100 bouncy balls in a room,
| took a photo and they formed a perfect circle in mid air at
| that instant from that angle, or if you went and placed the
| marbles one by one in a perfect circle on the ground and
| took a photo?
|
| The latter might be more meaningful, but the former is more
| miraculous - not in a religious sense of course, but just
| in the sense of the extraordinary unlikelihood of catching
| such a moment of chance alignment in noise, apophenic
| divinity, in how it seems to violate the second law, etc
| etc.
|
| It might be instructive for you to try look up Piero Della
| Francesca's method of generating perspective images from a
| point cloud (from the 14th century no less - he invented 3D
| face scanning then!) and try a few manual examples to
| really wrap your head around how difficult it would be for
| a perfect circle to emerge from a truly random point cloud.
| gcanyon wrote:
| If Pi is normal, which we haven't proven but do suspect
| to be true, then it contains Hamlet, and indeed the
| entire works of Shakespeare in chronological order, an
| infinite number of times.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
| szvsw wrote:
| Of course! But we haven't been proven it yet. And in any
| case, knowing something exists is quite different than
| actually observing it. I know every night in Vegas, so
| many people will hit my lucky number (7, boring I know)
| on a roulette wheel that it is a perfectly ordinary event
| with no significance, and yet I would be ecstatic if it
| happened to me and would certainly be _feeling lucky_
| (and so I don't gamble!). Even if Pi is indeed normal, it
| would still certainly be beyond surprising to stumble
| across the complete works of Shakespeare. In fact, from a
| cultural point of view, it would be a somewhat earth-
| shattering event! Imagine the headlines! Maybe not, maybe
| no one would care. It would certainly be shocking to
| anyone with half a brain cell, even if they knew it had
| to be somewhere... to find one such particular region is
| just so improbable that it would be undeniably... cool?
|
| My point is that structure emerging out of noise, even if
| by mere coincidence, is still deeply interesting on a
| human, psychological level. Another commenter described
| the original paper as astrology, essentially arguing that
| it is bad science... maybe that is the case, but I think
| there is still room for some form of... confusion,
| estrangement, awe? in observing these sorts of
| phenomenon, even in scientific discourse every now and
| then. It's vaguely like a piece of meaningless but none-
| the-less captivating art emerging out of the complex
| technological and discursive apparatuses of science.
| stouset wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes, of course, a 2D circle could appear as a line from a
| certain perspective in 3D space.
| sp332 wrote:
| I don't think a ring of galaxies is going to look very
| different from anyplace within the solar system. Anyway I
| think moralestapia's point is that the circle might not
| be centered on us, so the redshift of the galaxies would
| not be the same. We could still determine that a circle
| exists by plotting the galaxies in 3D.
| moralestapia wrote:
| No, I mean, a 2D circle could appear as a line from a
| certain perspective in 3D space.
|
| Spin up your mental model of a circle in 3D space, look
| at it from a vector perpendicular from its diameter,
| rotate it 90 degrees in any other axis but the one you're
| looking at it; on that 2D projection, it will be a line.
| glenstein wrote:
| >No, I mean, a 2D circle could appear as a line from a
| certain perspective in 3D space.
|
| Right, and as a matter of fact that's exactly what we DO
| see with the Milky Way galaxy. It can be conceived of as
| a circular disc, more or less, but in our sky we see it
| from the side, as a streak or a band rather than a disc.
| beltsazar wrote:
| But of all perspectives in 3D space, there are only a
| fraction of perspectives that see it as a line. Most
| other perspectives see it as a circle/ellipse. So, the
| earth's perspective is not that unique--in fact, it's the
| most common.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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).
| spdustin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Thank you!
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| But is he doing research? Has he read on the Cosmological
| Principle? Maybe some reading on what standard deviation
| (5.2s 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Pi constant appears again
| willis936 wrote:
| 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_mitm wrote:
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Your memory deceives you. The CMB was found accidentally in
| the sense that its discoverers were simply trying to reduce
| noise and found this one stubborn source, but it was
| predicted by Alpher twenty years prior.
|
| Can you go into how you would predict it without
| homogeneity? Without homogeneity you don't get the FLRW
| metric, so you won't get the big bang or expansion, so no
| hot dense state in the past, thus no CMB.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Well, I'm not a physicist, but, from Wikipedia:
|
| > In a strictly FLRW model, there are no clusters of
| galaxies or stars, since these are objects much denser
| than a typical part of the universe. Nonetheless, the
| FLRW model is used as a first approximation for the
| evolution of the real, lumpy universe because it is
| simple to calculate...
|
| So unless there's a really strong dependency on the size
| of the lumps, what breaks on the path from there to
| something observationally close-enough to the CMB? I
| mean, I know inflation is a factor there, but that very
| much postdates the first ideas of the big bang so it
| can't invalidate the basic idea.
|
| Ed: basically what I'm saying is, there are a lot of
| routes to a CMB-like prediction based on our
| observations, and I very much doubt they all get broken
| by lack of a cosmological principle.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I don't like playing that card, but I am a physicist, a
| cosmologist actually, and I wrote in my last post how it
| breaks. And I used the qualifier "approximation" in my
| first post of this thread. If you don't assume
| homogeneity _on large scales_ you don 't get a big bang.
| Or at least I'm not aware of any of the routes you are
| talking about. Even observing receding galaxies does not
| necessarily imply a big bang, which is why the debate
| wasn't settled until the discovery of the CMB. Until
| then, the steady state universe was still viable, which
| is basically an eternally expanding universe.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Are the features in the article big enough to break the
| CMB predictions? I'm kind of taking it from the article
| and surrounding works that they're big enough to break
| cosmological homogeneity as commonly understood, but
| maybe that's wrong too.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It was predicted, _then_ found accidentally. https://www.if
| i.unicamp.br/~assis/Apeiron-V2-p79-84(1995).pd... gives a
| date of 1948 for the following (Ralph Alpher and Robert
| Herman):
|
| > The temperature of the gas at the time of condensation
| was 600 K., and the temperature in the Universe at the
| present time is found to be about 5 K. We hope to pub- lish
| the details of these calculations in the near future.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_cosmic_microwave
| _... describes the kinda-accidental confirmation of this
| theory.
| scaglio wrote:
| _*The Three-Body Problem intensifies*_
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| 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
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I found a enlightening yet brief conference Alexia Lopez 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.
| gmuslera wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does anyone know how fast the big ring in the sky keeps on
| turning?
| barbequeer wrote:
| a year or more
| spdustin wrote:
| I don't know where I'll be tomorrow, but I understood your
| reference today.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Interesting journey.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's clearly a Cyclops smiley face.
|
| Or a weak wifi signal.
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| It's obviously the result of a construction project by a hitherto
| unknown Type IV civilization on the Kardashev scale. /s
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Do we have a guess what does the ring look like X million/billion
| years ago?
| undersuit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_zhang wrote:
| Sorry I meant to say...eh...maybe something from a few
| decades ago so to capture tiny changes.
| qD29Lno-oKXPLEv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is this the center of the universe then? Maybe the big band
| originated from the center of that ring.
| astrostl wrote:
| The universe is not believed to have a center.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Looks like Galactic Union )
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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