Astronomers have discovered what appears to be the largest feature in the observable universe, and—according to the Big Bang model—it shouldn’t even exist.

A team of Hungarian and U.S. astronomers say they have discovered a huge ring of nine gamma ray bursts (GRBs) that is five billion light years across. The scientists detailed their findings in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

GRBs are thought to be the result of massive stars collapsing into black holes. Because black holes are typically found inside galaxies, astronomers say the ring of GRBs is evidence of a gigantic galaxy ring.

All nine of the GRBs described in the paper are located at a similar distance from Earth, so the astronomers believe they are all associated with each other. However, that association presents a significant problem for the current Big Bang model.

“According to its discoverers,” Space.com reports, “there’s a 1-in-20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance—in other words, they are very likely associated with the same structure, a structure that, according to cosmological models, should not exist.”

The astronomers who discovered the galaxy ring acknowledged that its existence is “a clear contradiction” to the secular model of the universe’s beginnings.

“The formation of a structure with this large size and mass provides a real challenge to theoretical interpretations,” they noted. “In addition to the size and the mass of the structure, one has to explain why the GRB activity is much higher along the ring than it typically is in the field.”

“If we are right, this structure contradicts the current models of the universe,” said Dr. Lajos Balazs, who led the team of astronomers that discovered the ring of galaxies. “It was a huge surprise to find something this big—and we still don’t quite understand how it came to exist at all.”

Dr. Jake Hebert, a physicist with the Institute for Creation Research, said this discovery could be devastating for the Big Bang model.

“The possible existence of this giant ring of galaxies is of great interest because it would violate one of the fundamental tenets of the Big Bang model, namely the assumption that matter and energy, on cosmic distance scales, are distributed uniformly in space,” Hebert wrote in an article last week. “But such a uniform, or homogeneous, distribution of matter implies that giant structures, such as this ring of galaxies, should not exist.”

“The Big Bang model also assumes a property called isotropy, which means that, on the largest scales, there are no special directions in space,” Hebert continued. “Together, homogeneity and isotropy comprise the so-called ‘cosmological principle.’ The cosmological principle is foundational to the Big Bang, because these assumptions were built into the model at the earliest stages of its development. Hence, for secular scientists to abandon any of these assumptions would not constitute a minor tweak to the Big Bang story. Rather, it would require a complete re-write!”

Hebert concluded by saying that the Big Bang theory “is riddled with other serious problems.”

“Given these problems, one wonders why secular scientists (and even some Christians!) hold onto it so tenaciously,” he stated. “But since the Big Bang contradicts both the Bible’s straightforward creation account in Genesis and our observations, why should anyone take it seriously?”

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