Well this is weird. Unless it’s just some sort of strange observational effect…

“Galaxies along the sight-lines toward distant explosive gamma-ray bursts appear to be four times as abundant as in the directions of quasars.

Gamma-ray bursts are massive eruptions of dying stars. Quasars are constantly bright objects are thought to involve supermassive black holes surrounded by developing galaxies.

There is no known reason why foreground galaxies should have any association with these background light sources, researchers said.

‘The result contradicts our basic concepts of cosmology, and we are struggling to explain it,’ said Jason X. Prochaska, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.”

This really would be a problem for cosmology if the observation is verified. It appears to violate the principles of homogeneity and isotropy.

I suppose you could redefine the cosmological length scale so that these apparent density perturbations would be smoothed out – but that would only fix the homogeneity side of things. Isotropy would still be violated. Hmmm and double hmmm.

Read the rest here: SPACE.com — Apparent Concentrations of Galaxies Puzzles Astronomers