Pages

January 12, 2013

Largest structure in universe found, theory says it shouldn't exist..


Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretches 4 billion light-years from end to end.
The structure is a large quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive central black holes. This particular group is so large that it challenges modern cosmological theory, researchers said."While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe," lead author Roger Clowes, of the University of Central Lancashire in England, said in a statement. "This is hugely exciting, not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe."
Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. For decades, astronomers have known that they tend to assemble in huge groups, some of which are more than 600 million light-years wide.
But the record-breaking quasar group, which Clowes and his team spotted in data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is on another scale altogether. The newfound LQC is composed of 73 quasars and spans about 1.6 billion light-years in most directions, though it is 4 billion light-years across at its widest point.
To put that mind-boggling size into perspective, the disk of the Milky Way galaxy — home of Earth's solar system — is about 100,000 light-years wide. And the Milky Way is separated from its nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, by about 2.5 million light-years.
The newly discovered LQC is so enormous, in fact, that theory predicts it shouldn't exist, researchers said. The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.
Calculations suggest that structures larger than about 1.2 billion light-years should not exist, researchers said.
"Our team has been looking at similar cases which add further weight to this challenge, and we will be continuing to investigate these fascinating phenomena," Clowes said.
The new study was published Friday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

7 comments:

  1. NO life on Mars?
    Humans can NOT go to their ONLY Moon, and maybe never have?

    Robot rovers or just more cartoons?

    No surprise that we humans can NOT begin to understand the universe, HELL we can not even understand our own species!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Heheheh!

    Everything old is new again!

    What the Ancient Wisdom Schools knew, are being re-discovered by the arrogant scientists.

    ReplyDelete
  3. First of all, this talk of 'powered by black holes' is rubbish. The universe is powered by plasma dynamics.
    Second, if quasars are being used to gauge the extent and distance of this structure, the answer will certainly come out wrong, because we work out the distance of quasars from their red shift, but just as black-hole thinking is erroneous, so too is the idea that red shift shows distance. So if we get that wrong, we get the distance and dimensions of the structure wrong. in other words, this structure is smaller than we think, and nearer, because the quasars in it are near, not cosmological distances away.
    Plasma physics explains all this, whereas conventional cosmology is flummoxed. You choose which to accept.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Google Maps have a long way to go...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Time to abandon the gravity based universe and embrace Electrical universe (finally)?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sounds like God is having a party over at His place. Hope they don't run out of dip.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Everyhing is energy - and nothing!

    ReplyDelete