Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter from Scientific American and join a community of science-loving readers.<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cI will be very interested to hear the reaction of the community,\u201d says Katherine Freese, a cosmologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the new paper. Freese says that the study could challenge \u201cthe basic scaffolding for the universe that we all assume in our work.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cosmological principle states that the universe is \u201chomogeneous,\u201d meaning every patch of universe holds roughly the same amount of matter as every other, and that it is \u201cisotropic,\u201d meaning no direction is significantly different than any other. It\u2019s the founding mathematical premise for most models of the universe, and it underpins how cosmologists construct the equation for its shape. And it\u2019s the basis of cosmic inflation\u2014the theory that our universe underwent a period of extreme, rapid expansion just after the Big Bang. It\u2019s also the simplest explanation for the universe we see.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut in physics, there is no field in which the simplest solution applies in reality,\u201d contends Labini.<\/p>\n
DESI has spent the past five years measuring huge ranges of galaxies, covering much of the universe\u2019s structure at different moments in time. So Labini and his co-author Marco Galoppo compared galaxies along different directions in this data to see if they were all the same. They found that the standard cosmological model\u2014one based on a universe with no preferred direction\u2014couldn\u2019t explain the large, correlated structures DESI observed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis would be important if true, but requires much more careful verification,\u201d says David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation. Astronomers are puzzled that such a glaring inconsistency could have gone unnoticed in existing data, such as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which provides our earliest snapshot of the universe. \u201cThere would be CMB fluctuations roughly a hundred times bigger than we see if this were true,\u201d explains Spergel.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe claim in this paper seems to conflict with much that we know about large-scale structure in the universe,\u201d says John Peacock, professor of Cosmology at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. \u201cAnd in particular, with other results established using the same DESI data.\u201d<\/p>\n
To bolster such a strong claim, it will need corroboration. Peacock expects the DESI collaboration to begin that work itself. \u201cUntil we can understand if\/how this can be made consistent,\u201d says Peacock, \u201cI don’t expect that many people will be persuaded by the claims in the paper.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the most basic and accepted truths about the universe is that it\u2019s pretty much the same…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":554190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[271],"tags":[237286,63219,237290,18347,18,237287,19,17,237289,237288,452,133],"class_list":["post-554189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-cosmological-principle","tag-dark-energy-spectroscopic-instrument","tag-david-spergel","tag-desi","tag-eire","tag-francesco-sylos-labini","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-john-peacock","tag-katherine-freese","tag-physics","tag-science"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116813051227952290","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}