Cosmological Crisis? Could The Universe Be Ball Shaped
The anomaly in gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background may be just noise in the data. Or it may be a serious problem that may be explained by our Universe being not flat but ball-shaped.
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Who cares about the crazy speeding up and slowing down of the expansion of the Universe with the ghosts of dark energy flying around. This could be the real cosmological crisis that could collapse all our ideas about how the Universe works. At least this is what the authors of the study that talks about the shape of the Universe are saying.
To figure out what is the shape of an object that is around you is not easy. We still aren't totally sure what is the shape of the Milky Way. And we do have many similar galaxies to which we can compare it to. And it is probably not surprising that figuring out what the shape of the Universe is is much harder. Years of observing and cosmological modeling brought physicists to the idea that our Universe is flat. And when a photon flies through a flat Universe it should fly straight unless it gets knocked off of course.
Astronomer Eleonora Di Valentino from the British Manchester University and her colleagues claim that the Universe is not flat. Using data from the European Planck space observatory they are proving that our Universe is ball-shaped. And if a photon flew through such a Universe and nothing came into its way in an insanely long time it would fly to the spot where it started. This sounds very simple and actually fits how children view the Universe. But if Di Valentino and her colleagues are correct that we have a full-blown cosmological crisis on our hands.
The researchers started with the fact that radiation is affected by gravity – like with gravitational lensing. In their study, they focused on cosmic microwave background (CMB) that is being observed by the Planck observatory. CMB is the oldest know radiation in the Universe that got created about 380 thousand years after the Big Bang.
The data from the Planck observatory published in 2018 indicates that the relict radiation is gravitationally lensed more than it should. The Planck Collaboration team calls this the Alens anomaly. Di Valentino and her team claim that it could be solved if the Universe was ball-shaped. They are convinced that such a shape of the universe provides solid physical arguments for the anomaly.
But it will not be as easy. All the other analyses of the data from the Planck observatory – including the data from 2018 – concluded that our cosmological models our okay including the assumption of a flat universe. Also, research into dark energy doesn't agree with a ball-shaped universe.
For the moment, practically everything seems to be in favor of a flat Universe. The only issue is the anomaly. Maybe it is just some weird noise. Or it will be the problem that breaks our cosmological models. Or not. We just have to wait and see.
Sources:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0906-9
- https://www.sciencealert.com/wild-new-study-suggests-the-universe-is-curved-not-flat
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