The Lopez rings
RSI treats the Big Ring and Giant Arc as expected cross-sections of large-scale vortex tubes in a toroidal medium.
In 2021, Alexia Lopez identified the Giant Arc, a filament of galaxies about 3.3 billion light-years long. In 2024, she and her collaborators announced the Big Ring, a circular arc about 1.3 billion light-years across, near redshift z ≈ 0.8. Both are coherent and organized, and both are larger than the scale at which the universe is supposed to look uniform, the Giant Arc by nearly three times.
Standard cosmology expects the universe to look smooth above about 1.2 billion light-years, a statistical limit well beyond the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation spacing of about 490 million light-years. Larger structures are not strictly forbidden, but they should be very rare. The discoverers have said openly that these structures challenge the Cosmological Principle.
RSI holds that structure comes from the field's own fluid dynamics. The same toroidal flow, nested vortices, and standing waves that shape atoms operate at every scale. A ring of galaxies is then a slice through a cosmic vortex tube. In this view the Lopez structures are not violations of RSI but signatures of it.
From the paper: Chapter XIII, The Lopez Rings. Read the full section
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