Sunday 13 January 2013

Lumps in my cosmic cake mix?

This is big, just as Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.". And it seems there is something very odd about it (yes, another one).

Discovered half a century ago Quasi-Stellar objects are driven by
super massive black holes  in the centres of some of the
universe's oldest galaxies.
Astronomers have found that a large group of quasi-stellar objects(quasar) that spans 4 billion light years at its widest point, that's right, it's length almost 1/3rd of the radius of the observable universe! This structure, known as a LQG, is so large it calls into question a principle that suggests that any bit of the universe should bear a qualitative resemblance to every other bit. This is known as the cosmological principle.The models that support the cosmological principle suggest that no structure should be no larger than 1.2 billion light years should exist and yet the LQG is 1.6 billion light years in most directions and as already mentioned much larger in it's length.
Sky map of the biggest LQG
It has long been observed that quasars tend to appear in groups other groups have been observed spanning 600 million light years. ThIs structure is so large that despite its colossal distance from Earth it spans an area of the sky 29.4 by 24 degrees. That compares to 15 degrees the sun appears to progress in two hours.

Assumptions can have exceptions,
and still stand.
The Cosmological Principle has been a widely held assumption that perhaps now faces something of a challenge. Of course something else may be at work allowing this assumption to be  broken without negating it. We can see this in biology. Before a snake egg hatches, one can reasonably assume it will have a head at one end. and yet due to certain influences This assumption shows up false from time to time because of and excess growth factor. Never the less when this puzzle is solved, we will have a deeper understand of the way the universe operates.

Sources: NBC NEWS, Space.com, The Morning Starr, Daily Galaxy

What do you think?


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