This Giant Ring in Space Poses a Massive Problem for Cosmology

[00:00] Scientists just found the biggest thing  ever, right after Elon Musk’s ego:   it’s a giant ring of matter out there in  the cosmos, a suspicious arrangement of  

[00:12] hundreds of galaxy clusters with a diameter of  3 billion lightyears. It’s not just amazing,   it's also a big problem because the  mathematics says that it shouldn’t exist.  

[00:25] Just exactly what did they observe and  what does it mean? I have a brief summary. The new Giant Ring lies in the northern sky,  near the Big Dipper, in the direction of the  

[00:38] constellation Boötes. They named the giant ring  the giant ring which is good because let’s be   honest no one has any idea what Boötes is or  how to pronounce it. The giant ring is about  

[00:50] 7 billion light years away from us and 3 billion  light years – or 30 trillion kilometres across.  You can’t see it in the night sky because  it’s incredibly faint. In fact, it’s so  

[01:02] faint that even the astrophysicists  didn’t actually see it. Instead,   they inferred its presence by looking at  incredibly bright objects, called quasars,   that are behind the ring. This data comes from  the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. When the light  

[01:19] from the quasars passes through gas on its way  to us, some colours are partly absorbed. And from   this absorption one can infer the presence  of the gas. What’s so important about gas?   Actually most of the matter in the universe is  in the form of gas, not in stars or planets.

[01:37] The problem is though that our current model  of the universe says such a structure should   not exist. You see, physicists currently  believe that the universe began with a very   hot plasma that was mostly smooth with some small  fluctuations in it. The universe expands and the  

[01:55] plasma cools and begins to clump. It forms  stars and galaxies and galaxy clusters and,   well, big clouds of gas. How big those  clumps can get depends on how much time  

[02:07] has passed. And the Great Ring just shouldn’t  be there. It’s not compatible with the maths. The authors of the new paper say it’s an  outlier at about 4 sigma, meaning it’s very   unlikely to occur just coincidentally, at a  chance of about 1 in 20 thousand. And this is  

[02:25] just the Great Ring alone, this doesn’t  take into account that astrophysicists   have found other such big structures. Indeed, the astronomers found the Giant   Ring near two other mega structures called  the “Giant Arc” and the “Big Ring” . Both  

[02:41] of those have been found in the past years. But there have been other large structures   which have been found earlier.  Already in nineteen-ninety-one,   they found a group of thirty-four Quasars,  about the same distance as the big ring that  

[02:55] extends over two Billion Light-years.  It’s called the Clowes-Campusano-Quasar   group. Since 2003 astrophysicists also know the  „great wall“, that’s a collection of galaxies  

[03:07] about a billion light years away from us  that extends over 1 point 5 billion light   years. That too, is larger than it should be. None of these structures should exist, and if   you were to combine the statistical unlikeliness  it’d be stunning. The Big Ring alone has been  

[03:24] reported as an outlier at 5 point 2 sigma,  meaning it has a probability of less than one   in 3 million to have appeared by chance. And that  doesn’t factor in all the other big structures.

[03:36] What does that mean now? One word of caution  I must add is that many of those observations   come from the same group around Roger  Clowes at the University of Lancashire.   They’ve been criticized for how they calculate the  statistical significance of their observations.

[03:53] The problem is quite similar to the problem of  quantifying how rare an extreme weather event is.   You see, the more details you add  about the event or structure whose   likeliness you want to quantify, the  fewer of those there are. I mean,  

[04:08] why just search for rings? Why not search  for the shape of a giraffe or I dunno,   a middle finger? You could do all these things,  and the more you try, the more likely you are   to find something. Then you forget to mention  all the different things you tried and insist  

[04:24] it was extremely unlikely to find whatever you  did find. That’s cheating with statistics 101. Now look, I am not saying it’s what  they did. I am just saying this is   a common pitfall in such analyses and I  would be more comfortable if there were  

[04:39] multiple independent studies on the  matter. This is why I give this paper   a 5 out of 10 on the bullshit meter. Not  because it’s wrong but because I’m wary. That said, I suspect that if other groups were  to look at this, they would arrive at a similar  

[04:55] conclusion, because we have other evidence that  matter in the universe isn’t distributed the way   our current theories say. We discussed this a few  times in the past. To me the real story here is   that most astrophysicists seem to be remarkably  uninterested in even looking at this problem.

[05:12] It may be a crack in cosmology,  a statistical artefact, or the   universe’s attempt to propose  to Boötes, whoever that is.

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