A massive cosmic ring may challenge a key assumption about the universe

PHOENIX — An abnormally huge cosmic structure has put a ring on it — and that bling might threaten a fundamental assumption of cosmology.

A ring of dense matter spans more than 3.3 billion light-years, cosmologist Alexia Lopez reported January 6 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. If real, the structure could pose a problem for the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe looks the same in all directions on large scales.

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