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Navigating the universe can be more mind-blowing than we thought.
If our universe takes the form of a finished three-dimensional donut, we can imagine a spaceship traveling in one direction and eventually ending up where it started. Something like this might actually be the case, according to a prime Live Science report.
“We could say: now we know the size of the universe,” Thomas Buchert, an astrophysicist at the University of Lyon, at the France-based Center for Research in Astrophysics, said in the report. This idea has yet to be proven, but it would provide new and bizarre clues to the behavior, structure, and ultimate fate of the universe.
A universe in the shape of a donut
If we live in a donut shaped universe, the first two things we will know are: the cosmos is finished and much smaller than we thought (only three to four times larger than what we can currently see) . This is significant, despite our limited telescopic scope of study. It would also imply that the universe will eventually collapse on itself, instead of expanding outward forever, read the Live Science report. This is a question that spawns many more, but there is plenty of evidence to lend credence to the “big donut” hypothesis. To map the topology of the universe, astrophysicists measured the disturbances of the cosmic diffuse background (CMB), which is an ambient background noise at the beginning of the universe, during the Big Bang.
“In infinite space, temperature disturbances from CMB radiation exist at all scales,” Buchert said in an email to Live Science. “If, however, space is finite, then those wavelengths which are greater than the size of space are missing.” Researchers have found that there is a maximum limit to the size of disturbances in the universe. Unless there is an analysis error, this means that the universe is closing in on itself, since a cosmos opening onto infinity could withstand CMB disturbances of all sizes. But even if the universe is finite and shaped like a donut, a spaceship would not be able to “buckle” to its starting position after crossing the surface of the cosmos. This is because the universe is always expanding faster than the speed of light, which means that unless we find a way to travel faster than light, no one could ever get there. where it started.
Large-scale cosmic disturbances missing from the data
NASA’s WMAP and ESA’s Planck satellites helped scientists build their CMB maps, and they revealed an exceptional number of missing large-scale disturbances. Having concluded that the limited size of the disturbances involves a three-dimensional donut, or a three-dimensional torus, according to its mathematical name. “We find a much better match with the observed fluctuations, compared to the standard cosmological model which is considered to be infinite,” Buchert added in the report. “We can vary the size of the space and repeat this analysis. The result is an optimal size of the universe that best matches the observations of the CMB.”
“The answer to our paper is clearly that the finite universe fits observations better than the infinite model,” Buchert said. If this theory of the three tori (or big donut) of the universe is confirmed later, astrophysicists could one day report that we finally know the size of the universe, if or when it will start to collapse on itself. , and more.
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