News Cosmology

A massive cosmic ring may challenge a key assumption about the universe

The ring breaks the assumption that the universe looks uniform at large scales

A big yellow ring encircles a smaller blue ring against a backdrop of stars and constellations

If it were visible to the naked eye, this is how a newly spotted giant ring of galaxies (yellow dots) surrounding a smaller ring (blue dots) would look in the night sky. Each dot corresponds to a distant quasar’s light filtering through diffuse matter around a galaxy.

Alexia Lopez, Roger Clowes, Stellarium Web Online Star Map

By Lisa Grossman

PHOENIX — An abnormally huge cosmic structure has put a ring on it — and that bling might threaten a fundamental assumption of cosmology.