A strange pair of galaxies several billion light-years away could be evidence of a hypothetical 'crease' in the Universe's fabric known as a cosmic st

We May Have Just Found Evidence of a Cosmic String: a 'Crease' in The Universe

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2024-06-07 20:30:02

A strange pair of galaxies several billion light-years away could be evidence of a hypothetical 'crease' in the Universe's fabric known as a cosmic string.

According to an analysis of the properties of the pair, the two galaxies may not be distinct objects, but a duplicate image caused by a trick of the light. And the reason the light is duplicated could be because of a scar in the space between us and the galaxy, creating a gravitational lens.

A paper describing this cosmic string candidate, led by Margarita Safonova of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has been accepted in the Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, and is available on preprint server arXiv.

Cosmic strings are like tiny, one-dimensional wrinkles or cracks through the fields of the Universe, thought to have been created at the very dawn of time as reality stretched and then froze into place.

These theoretical topological defects are estimated to be no wider than a proton, may extend the entire breadth of the Universe, and are thought to be incredibly dense and massive. Theory suggests that they may very well be real, but we haven't seen much physical evidence of them.