Giant rings as the most recent evidence for the notion of cosmic string

Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube video (see this) about the observation of a giant ring (GR) having a diameter of 3 billion ly with a statistical significance is 4.1 σ (1/20,000) in constellation Bo tes at a distance of 7 billion light years. The article "Giant Ring in the Sky" by Lopez and Clowes (see this) reports the discovery.

GR has clusters of galaxies behind it. The light arriving from the galaxies is absorbed as it travels through the gas. There is an enhanced absorption at the ring. GR has as its part Giant Arc (GA) (see this) having northern and southern parts and encloses Big Ring (BR) (see this) having 4.5± .6 σ evidence. BR has diameter ∼ 400 Mpc.

Here is the abstract of the article:

We present the discovery of "A Giant Ring on the Sky" (GR); a ring-like, ultra-large-scale structure at z ∼ 0.8, located in the same field that contains the previously-documented Giant Arc (GA) and Big Ring (BR). The GR was predicted from the presence of a Northern Arc (NA) filament (noted in previous work), which looked like it could, with more or enhanced data, connect with the GA to form a giant ring that encompasses the BR.

There is now much evidence to support the reality of a GR. There appear to be two overlapping versions of the GR which differ by only the left-hand-side trajectory; this branching in the LHS of the GR was identified with the FilFinder algorithm and appears to correspond to both the GR prediction (the extended, elliptical, GR from the GA+NA ellipse), and the visually-identified ellipse (the visually-impressive, almost contiguous, roughly circular, GR which is enhanced by a tilted viewing angle). The branching in the GR seems to be hinting at multiple, overlapping ring features. The GR consists of a thin, filamentary northern region, a clustered, ambiguous southern region (including the members of the GA), and filamentary branching towards the LHS.

Statistical assessment with elliptical shells, and optimum elliptical-shell-matching, identified two ≥ 4σ ellipse features corresponding to the GR prediction and to the visually-identified GR. Additionally, the 2D Power Spectrum Analysis identified significant (3.5σ ) clustering on scales ∼ 320 Mpc. We also applied our statistical assessments to random data and to FLAMINGO-10K simulated data. The results demonstrate that, while superficially "significant" elliptical shells can be reproduced in random data with the optimum ellipse-matching method (many trials giving the "look-elsewhere" effect), with 2D PSA all of the random fields, and FLAMINGO-10K fields, were found to be entirely consistent with random.

The structures cannot have gravitational origin since the formation of bound states of this size by gravitational condensation is impossible in ΛCDM scenario. Some new interaction is needed. In TGD, space-times are 4-D surfaces in H=M⁴× CP₂ satisfying holography = holomorphy principle predicting that, apart from 3-D singularities representing edges of the space-time, space-time surfaces minimal surfaces obeying generalized holography satisfy the field equations for any general coordinate invariant variational principle constructible in terms of the induced geometry. Cosmic strings, which can thicken to monopole flux tubes, are fundamental structures predicted by TGD. They appear in all scales from cosmology to hadron physics and even down to CP₂ scale (see this and this). The natural identification of Giant Ring and Big Ring is as closed cosmic strings, whose immense gravitational field attracts gas around them.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.