Overview

• Astronomer Alexia Lopez has discovered a second ultra-large structure in the universe, named the Big Ring, which is challenging our understanding of cosmology.
• The Big Ring, located 9.2 billion light-years from Earth, has a diameter of 1.3 billion light-years and a circumference of 4 billion light-years.
• The Big Ring and the previously discovered Giant Arc, both found by Lopez, are in the same cosmological neighborhood and are only 12 degrees apart in the sky.
• These structures challenge the Cosmological Principle, which assumes that the universe is homogeneous and that matter is evenly distributed in space.
• Possible explanations for these structures include Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, the passing of cosmic strings, or a departure from standard cosmological understanding.