Op-Ed: Giant cosmic Big Ring is corkscrewing – What makes it do that?

In this screen grab of a White House broadcast the first infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is seen during a briefing with US President Joe Biden and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials in the South Court Auditorium at the White House in Washington, DC, on July 11, 2022.The JWST is the most powerful telescope launched into space and it reached its final orbit around the sun, approximately 930,000 miles from Earths orbit, in January, 2022. The technological improvements of the JWST and distance from the sun will allow scientists to see much deeper into our universe with greater detail. — © AFP/NASA

The James Webb Telescope is rewriting the history of the universe, and upending a lot of core theories. It’s also throwing a few space-time curve balls, and the Big Ring of galaxies is one of them.

This gigantic ring is 1.2 billion light-years across. If the artistic impression images are anything to go by, it really is a circular shape in two dimensions. Nobody thought that was possible.

There’s a profound but understandable lack of information regarding the specific galaxies in the Big Ring. How old is the Big Ring? What are the ages and relationships with each other? Have they been gathered together over time or are they acting in relation to a local gravity situation? Are they ordered into a ring by some unknown gravitational phenomenon?

This vast ring of galaxies isn’t a sort of decorative place mat, either. It’s active. It’s actually corkscrewing. “Corkscrew” means a more or less symmetrical consistent directional screwing motion. That’s where classic physics gets a word in edgewise.

According to all known laws of physics, there needs to be a driving source of energy for the Big Ring to be able to corkscrew. Now it gets even more opaque in terms of physics beyond the Newtonian level.

Another more or less accurate word for this type of corkscrew motion is vortex. Vortices exist in micro and macro environments. A black hole is a vortex. So is the water going down your kitchen sink.  Earth’s orbit around the sun looks like a corkscrew in real-time, too.

OK, that still leaves us with the question of what is driving the Big Ring corkscrew? Gravitational forces created by itself? It requires a lot of mass and gravity to move such a vast structure.

There’s another galactic megastructure in the vicinity of the Big Ring called the Great Arc. What created the arc shape, of all possible configurations? These are both huge local events, even in context with the trillions of galaxies in the known universe.

Is there a superstructure creating the Big Ring and causing it to corkscrew? This can’t be a rhetorical question. Any physical action has a cause.

The problem with terminology in cosmology is usually scale. There are supermassive things, megastructures, and just maybe scales nobody’s seen before. The driver of the corkscrew may be something so big nobody’s even thought of it before.

Symmetry doesn’t “just happen”, even in basic physics. The consistent morphologies of the Big Ring and the Great Arc are interesting. The curves give unique pictures of “curved space”.

Nothing else seems to have curves like that or in that form. Well, at least not yet. They’re not ball shapes, condensed by a local center of gravity. They don’t even have similar curves in relation to each other.

This is where visualization needs some space, excuse the pun. It would require colossal mass to create a ring of orbiting galaxies. So, what exactly are they orbiting, if those are orbits?  

Is the Great Arc the remains of a former Big Ring? Maybe the Great Arc is a released former Big Ring, dissipating. Is something blowing smoke rings with galaxies?  Are these phenomena some sort of distant cousins of a Fermi Bubble, extrusions from a bigger structure?

One way or another, cosmology isn’t in Kansas anymore. This type of cosmic tornado obviously needs a bit of Yellow Brick logic. Probably one brick at a time.