Royal Astronomical Society | 2015 Aug 05
[img3="An image of the distribution of GRBs on the sky at a distance of 7 billion light years, centred on the newly discovered ring. The positions of the GRBs are marked by blue dots and the Milky Way is indicated for reference, running from left to right across the image. (Credit: L. Balazs)"]http://www.ras.org.uk/images/stories/pr ... 20ring.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]A Hungarian-US team of astronomers have found what appears to be the largest feature in the observable universe: a ring of nine gamma ray bursts – and hence galaxies - 5 billion light years across. The scientists, led by Prof Lajos Balazs of Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, report their work in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous events in the universe, releasing as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun does over its 10 billion year lifetime. They are thought to be the result of massive stars collapsing into black holes. Their huge luminosity helps astronomers to map out the location of distant galaxies, something the team exploited.
The GRBs that make up the newly discovered ring were observed using a variety of space- and ground-based observatories (the sample is listed in the Gamma Ray Burst Online Index). They appear to be at very similar distances from us – around 7 billion light years – in a circle 36° across on the sky, or more than 70 times the diameter of the Full Moon. This implies that the ring is more than 5 billion light years across, and according to Prof Balazs there is only a 1 in 20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance. ...
A giant ring-like structure at 0.78 < z < 0.86 displayed by GRBs - L. G. Balazs et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 452(3):2236 (2015 Sep 21) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv1421
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1507.00675 > 02 Jul 2015