A team of astronomers identified the largest feature in the universe: a galactic ring stretching five billion light years across.
According to Discovery News, authors of a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society detailed a ring of galaxies apparently larger than any spatial structure ever spotted before.
The researchers made their discovery using the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest thanks to a series of gamma ray bursts (GRB) that illuminated the search area.
The new study challenges the "Cosmological Principle," which essentially caps how large galactic structures can be, about 1.2 billion light years, the Royal Astronomical Society stated in a press release.
"If the ring represents a real spatial structure, then it has to be seen nearly face-on because of the small variations of GRB distances around the object's center," reads the principle. "The ring could though instead be a projection of a sphere, where the GRBs all occurred within a 250 million year period, a short timescale compared with the age of the universe."
The newly discovered structure is nearly five times the Cosmological Principle's supposed limit.
"If we are right, this structure contradicts the current models of the universe," Lajos Balazs, of the Konkoly Observatory, said in the release. "It was a huge surprise to find something this big - and we still don't quite understand how it came to exist at all."
