“From current cosmological theories we didn’t think structures on this scale were possible,” said Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire, who led the analysis.
Intriguingly, the two structures are at the same distance from Earth, near the constellations of Boötes the Herdsman, raising the possibility that they are part of a connected cosmological system.
The Big Ring was discovered by analysing data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a catalogue of distant quasars.
The structure appears as an almost perfect ring on the sky, but further analysis revealed it has more of a coil shape, like a corkscrew, which is aligned face-on with Earth.
Another explanation is the existence of cosmic strings, hypothetical “defects” in the fabric of the universe that could cause matter to clump along large-scale faultlines.
Wagner said it was possible to accommodate the Big Ring within the cosmological principle, depending on how its limits are defined, but that the more of these outlier, large-scale structures that are discovered, the less statistically plausible this view becomes.
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