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   It’s hard to overstate just how incredibly gigantic that is. Galaxy superclusters are usually the largest relatively common structure in the universe, measuring over a hundred million light-years wide. These can link up into filaments that stretch a few hundred million light-years long, forming part of the cosmic web.

    Not only is the Big Ring bigger than those, but it’s bigger than should be possible for any structure to ever get. According to the Cosmological Principle, a fundamental part of physical cosmology, the universe should look uniform in all directions, for any observer anywhere within it. Sure, there are random variations in the distribution of stars and galaxies, but on the largest scales it all blends together into a homogenous pattern like static. The Cosmological Principle sets an upper limit of 1.2 billion light-years on the size of any structures – a limit that the Big Ring blatantly disregards. To continue the analogy, it would be nigh on impossible for the static on your TV to arrange itself into a big image of the Mona Lisa.

   If it was a one-off find, it might be tempting to dismiss the Big Ring as an anomaly or a mistake. But it’s not the only “impossible” giant structure out there – and it’s not even the biggest. Two years ago the same astronomer, Alexia Lopez at the University of Central Lancashire, discovered a 3.3-billion-light-year-long crescent called the Giant Arc. In 2015 other scientists discovered the Giant GRB Ring, with a staggering diameter of 5.6 billion light-years. And then there’s the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, a galaxy filament that stretches an incomprehensible 10 billion light-years (although its status as a single structure is up for debate).

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Source: University of Central Lancashire