The biggest thing in the universe — sounds pretty straightforward, right?
Well, not exactly. We all love a good cosmological superlative — the hottest, the brightest, the most massive — but studying space is rarely that simple. In many cases, the "mosts" of the universe bend our theoretical properties of physics in ways we don't understand.
A group of international scientists have recently discovered something that's vying for the title of biggest thing in the observable universe: a clustered ring of galaxies located about 7 billion light-years away. But the ring, detailed in the latest monthly notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, is so big that some cosmologists are saying it violates the basic theoretical principles governing the universe.
To read more, click here.