Newly discovered cosmic megastructure challenges theories of the universe | Space | The Guardian:

Astronomers have discovered a ring-shaped cosmic megastructure, the proportions of which challenge existing theories of the universe.

The so-called Big Ring has a diameter of about 1.3bn light years, making it among the largest structures ever observed. At more than 9bn light years from Earth, it is too faint to see directly, but its diameter on the night sky would be equivalent to 15 full moons.

[…] “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. “We could expect maybe one exceedingly large structure in all our observable universe.”

If the Universe is homogenous (a fundamental cosmological assertion) then the fact that we see two of these (maybe more?) means that assertion needs to be revisited. And there’s a bunch of deductions in Cosmology that derive from that assertion, so it means we’re going to have a look at a whole bunch of ideas with a new light.

It’s things like this that contradict what we thought we all understood that signal a new physics needs to be conceived. Same thing happened with the Black Body Radiation Curve and the Photoelectric effect. The computer you’re using to read this now is only possible because we followed those contradictions down the rabbit hole.

15 moons in diameter. That’s really big! Wow.