A mysterious structure nearly 1 billion light-years across has been found in our cosmic neighborhood, and it could be a relic from the Big Bang.
The structure, consisting of a group of galaxies clustered around a gigantic spherical void just 820 million light years from the Milky Way, has been named Ho'oleilana, a name inspired by the Hawaiian creation chant, Kumulipo.
It is believed to be a baryon acoustic oscillation, a pressure wave frozen in time from the beginning of the cosmos and then stretched out to galactic scales by the universe’s expansion. The researchers who stumbled upon the weird relic published their findings Sept. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal.
"We were not looking for it. It is so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analyzing," Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, said in a statement.
To read more, click here.