Large Quasar Group 4 Billion Light-Years Across; ‘Should not Exist’
January 12th, 2013Via: MSNBC:
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretches 4 billion light-years from end to end.
The structure is a large quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive central black holes. This particular group is so large that it challenges modern cosmological theory, researchers said.
“While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe,” lead author Roger Clowes, of the University of Central Lancashire in England, said in a statement. “This is hugely exciting, not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe.”
Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. For decades, astronomers have known that they tend to assemble in huge groups, some of which are more than 600 million light-years wide.
But the record-breaking quasar group, which Clowes and his team spotted in data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is on another scale altogether. The newfound LQC is composed of 73 quasars and spans about 1.6 billion light-years in most directions, though it is 4 billion light-years across at its widest point.
…
The newly discovered LQC is so enormous, in fact, that theory predicts it shouldn’t exist, researchers said. The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.
Calculations suggest that structures larger than about 1.2 billion light-years should not exist, researchers said.
There’s an entirely different thread of scientific theory running parallel to the official version of cosmology dominated by mathematical modeling.
I would argue it’s superior, as someone who formally studied electrical theory and such like over the years. No hoo-ha required, just hard laboratoiry science applied and scaled.
With deep roots in the fringe thinking of the catastrophist school led in the early 20th Century by Immanuel Velikovsky, the underpinnings of the contemporary “Electric Universe” school are on full display here…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AUA7XS0TvA
As an added bonus, there are physical parallels wandering off into anthropolgy and mythology backed by current experimental work in plasma research at sites like Livermore.
Seen through this alternate lens, which allows the movement of electricity and charged particles (plasma) across interstellar space (think Tesla), phenomena like that described in the headline are far easier to model, explain and understand.