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Re:A Big Ring on the Sky by ineptech on Monday May 27, 2024 @03:11PM (#40493662)
For any allegedly-random distribution, it's possible to statistically determine an upper-limit on the size of non-random-appearing structures. The upper limit for such structures in our universe is thought to be about 370 MPc, about 1/3rd of the size of this ring.

A lot of these questions are much more clearly addressed in the previous paper by the same authors, which is much more layperson-friendly: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/516/2/1557/6657809?lo...

Re:A Big Ring on the Sky by stouset on Tuesday May 28, 2024 @04:16AM (#40498576)
I’m guessing the point is something along the lines of, if you have a page of randomly-distributed points, you would expect to see small features but a large circle spanning the page would be inexplicable.

That makes sense, thanks for actually explaining the core idea.