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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the go-east-to-get-west dept.

When researchers reanalysed the gold-standard data set of the early universe, they concluded that the cosmos must be "closed," or curled up like a ball. Most others remain unconvinced.

A provocative paper published today in the journal Nature Astronomy argues that the universe may curve around and close in on itself like a sphere, rather than lying flat like a sheet of paper as the standard theory of cosmology predicts. The authors reanalysed a major cosmological data set and concluded that the data favours a closed universe with 99% certainty — even as other evidence suggests the universe is flat.

The data in question — the Planck space telescope's observations of ancient light called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — "clearly points towards a closed model," said Alessandro Melchiorri of Sapienza University of Rome. He co-authored the new paper with Eleonora di Valentino of the University of Manchester and Joseph Silk, principally of the University of Oxford. In their view, the discordance between the CMB data, which suggests the universe is closed, and other data pointing to flatness represents a "cosmological crisis" that calls for "drastic rethinking."

What Shape Is the Universe?

In your opinion, which shape is more likely ?


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:24AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:24AM (#916661)

    The inside and outside of a sphere both have positive curvature, negative curvature is not so straightforward.

    A plane has zero curvature - simultaneously shoot two projectiles (in frictiononless vacuum, etc) parallel to each other across the surface, a short distance apart, and their paths will forever stay the same distance apart
    A sphere has positive curvature - do the same thing, and the paths of the projectiles will eventually cross
    A hyperbolic "saddle" has negative curvature - do the same thing, and the paths of the projectiles will diverge

    Hyperbolic space is profoundly weird. As a visualization aid of 2D hyperbolic space, some projections of hyperbolic space onto a flat plane as drawn by Escher, using one of the more common mathematician's visualization transforms: http://www.josleys.com/show_gallery.php?galid=325 [josleys.com]
    The figures are all the same size, but there's an infinite distance between the center of the circle and the rim. If you were to follow parallel lines extending from each side of the black X, you will see that the farther you travel, the more figures there are that can fit between the lines - the more space there is between those lines. And that's true no matter where in the drawing you start - all points in space are still equivalent, the center point is just where you happen to be looking from.

    I've heard that hyperbolic space can actually be useful for describing some aspects of Relativity, but I don't really know anything more about that.

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