LogFAQs > #886047542

DawkinsNumber4 posted...

Calculations suggest that structures larger than about 1.2 billion light-years should not exist, researchers said."

On a note, no less than John Archibald Wheeler criticized the Cosmological Principle and thought it was as close to religious faith as you can get in cosmology. Then again, he was in the extreme minority.

As for the Lyman-Alpha blobs, there is a suggestion that these structures are not as big as they look. Our galaxy might be on the outer edge of a supervoid. Light gets stretched and sped up due to gravitational lensing at the void's border, so it throws our measurements off slightly. These quasar groups might not be connected into large structures.

Another theory is that these large structures are caused by statistical anomalies in quantum fluctuations within the early universe just before inflation. This was when all points of the universe were still casually connected and could influence each other. The anomaly in temperature comes up in 1 out of 15 simulated models of our early universe. In statistical terms, that's pretty frequent.

In the end, the Cosmological Principle is not in danger despite these findings.
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"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
-Mark Twain