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The universe, that 13.8billion-year-old thing we call home, is a weird place.
But one thing that has made sense to scientists for the better part of a century is the belief that the cosmos is surprisingly uniform.
This is known as the cosmological principle, or the idea that if you took a step back – a very big step back – and took a photo of the universe, it would look smooth and blurry, like you forgot to wear glasses.
A paper published in the journal Nature, however, argues this might not be the case.
Rather, things look different from every direction you look at from a large scale, and the galaxies line up almost into patterns.
While this might not sound like a big deal, if proven, this would change the maths that explains how existence works.
Researchers figured this out by looking at the largest map of the known universe observed by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument.
They compared this to simulations of how dark matter – the mysterious something holding galaxies together – is distributed in a uniform cosmos.
Researchers checked if there was any kind of pattern when comparing them.
‘Essentially, we asked what the probability of finding a galaxy at a given distance with respect to another and along a given direction,’ study co-author Marco Galoppo tells Metro.
Galoppo, of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, should have been left cooing at how homogeneous (the same everywhere) and isotropic (the same in all directions) the universe is.
It should begin to smooth out when observed at scales of about 100 megaparsecs – roughly 300 million light-years – from every direction.
Instead, they saw a stringy, bumpy web of galaxies and voids even when approaching a whopping one gigaparsec, which is three billion light-years.
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‘We would all (where “all” is the observational cosmology community of 5,000 people) love this mismatch to be genuinely new physics because for us that is like winning the World Cup,’ she adds.
‘But my personal opinion, this study is part of the qualifying stages, not the final 32.’
Konstantinos Migkas, a Dutch astrophysicist, says the findings follow similar studies published this year.
And his own, too, which was referenced by Galoppo. Migkas and his colleagues also found signs of anisotropy, adding further questions to why there is something in some places but not elsewhere.
‘This does not mean that anything has been concluded yet, but it is natural that assumptions built into our standard model will be tested more sharply as data quality and volume improve,’ Migkas tells Metro.
Not everyone is swayed.
‘It’s not a big deal for the world of cosmology because this paper is wrong,’ says Seshadri Nadathur, a professor in cosmology at the University of Portsmouth.
Nadathur suggested the patterns could be chalked up to galaxy bias, where galaxies seem to clump together, which distorts measurements.
‘The reason we believe the universe is uniform is because observations of the real universe suggest it is true, and there has never been any convincing evidence otherwise,’ he adds.
‘There are occasional claims of some discovery contradicting this picture, but they are always flawed.’
