Astronomers Found a Ring in Space That Spans 5.6 Billion Light Years Across

Every now and then there is something in science which is totally surprising.  This particular discovery is quite unexpected:

A team of astronomers from Hungary and the United States has announced the discovery of the largest regular formation in the observable Universe – a ring with a diameter of 5.6 billion light-years, displayed by 9 gamma ray bursts (GRBs), and hence galaxies.

GRBs are short-lived and luminous flashes of gamma-rays from space associated with energetic explosions that have been observed in far-off galaxies. They can last from a few milliseconds to several minutes and come from random directions of the sky.

The GRBs that make up the newly-discovered ring-like structure were observed using space- and ground-based telescopes. They appear to be at very similar distances from us – around 9 billion light years – in a circle 36 degrees across on the sky, or more than 70 times the diameter of the full Moon.

Yes you read that correctly.  This thing is so big it is hard to get one’s mind around.

Do you find it odd that it took astronomers that long to discover something like that?

And do you think this means anything particular or is just another cool space phenomenon?

Here is the likelihood that this is just chance.  And from statistics class, or just plain common sense it sure seems that the observation has rhyme and reason to it!

This implies that the ring is more than 5 billion light-years across, and, according to the team, there is only a 1 in 20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance.

And below is a cool video of these gamma ray bursts described as such:

An artist’s conception of the environment around GRB 020819B based on ALMA observations. The GRB occurred in an arm of a galaxy in the constellation of Pisces (The Fishes). GRBs are huge explosions of a star spouting high-speed jets in a direction toward the observer. In a complete surprise, less gas was observed than expected, and correspondingly much more dust, making some GRBs appear as “dark GRBs”.

We hope you like the video and I am curious to see if astronomers will come up with more meaning about this surprising observation.

thanks to sci-news.com for the great info and thanks to eso.org for the great info