this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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A Big Cosmological Mystery

Discovery of a second ultra-large structure in distant space further challenges what we understand about the universe.

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[–] GlitchyDigiBun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 years ago

Not entirely. Statistics are a powerful tool, and their primary purpose is to discern order from entropy. We expect that, much like spilled marbles, the universe should form like scattered, chaotic clumps of density and sparseness with no rhyme or reason save the relatively simple interractions through gravitational forces. And it's also those forces that dictate the simple repeating structures of disk-shaped clusters orbiting a point called a galaxy, who's inner workings are, statistically, as chaotic as water molecules swirling in microgravity without breaking surface tension. Finding highly ordered structures under the scale of a galaxy and greater than a lightyear would to any statistician look like an outlier of the highest order and worth looking into.

Now as a layperson, I could see 100 billion marbles forming many shapes we would consider going against entropy, but if a statistician goes "oh that's odd," then it's probably significant.