The universe could be shaped like a weird, twisted funhouse: ScienceAlert

Ever since Albert Einstein showed that space and time can shrink, warp, and expand like an old mattress in a cheap hotel, cosmologists have looked up and thought about what kind of food our universe most closely resembles in shape.

Is it in the form of an infinite pringle, Bending up and out Forever forever? Could it be a completely flat pizza if you ignored the Hungarian pepperoni bumps and the cheesy dark stuff? Maybe it’s like a hot meatball, curving back until it meets itself on all sides.

Or maybe it’s like a donut that forms closed loops in multiple dimensions. An international team of cosmologists, who recently formed a group called the COMPACT Collaboration, analyzed the residual flare from the Big Bang and concluded that there is nothing in its patterns to rule out such a cosmic spectacle, if it is skewed in the right direction, at least.

Since “cosmic twisted donut” is not a real mathematical term (yet), researchers use this term 3- Al-Haid To describe the mind-boggling prospect of poking yourself in the back of the head with a stick tens of billions of light-years long no matter which direction you’re facing.

Yes, you read that correctly. Said another way, our universe could be a giant entertainment carnival, where instead of a series of mirrors, space-time bends in every direction, allowing you to – in theory – see your back pockets if you squint hard enough.

It’s an enticing prospect It has been reviewed Over the years, and not just because physicists have a thing for sweet treats. Large-scale exotics could clue us into the physics of how our universe emerged from the seed of… well, something.

Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, everything we can see (and, for that matter, everything we can’t see) was crammed into an impossibly small space that science had yet to describe, requiring a combination of quantum physics and general relativity that we haven’t yet arrived at. To land on it.

What Can These are the moments in which space expands and the matter inside it cools. At some point, the universe expanded enough that some of its electromagnetic radiation could escape the dense crowds of electrons and freeze atomic nuclei.

A small fraction of those free photons have managed to avoid collisions ever since, humming happily as the expansion of space stretched the light into a long, cool lattice of microwave radiation.

This low-energy “glow” is called cosmic microwave background (CMB). Mapping subtle changes in the CMB’s flare can give us a rough idea of ​​what the first moments of expansion look like. While this is useful for some models, the scale and patterns within the map depend largely on how the space is shaped, leaving other theories open.

If we lived inside a giant pizza? All these fluctuations must accurately reflect the same scale. Got a Pringle universe? Light may bend in such a way that the differences are smaller than they appear. meat balls? The light may have been amplified.

And if it’s a donut? The universe would be topologically flat, like a pizza, with only recurring patterns that might indicate phenomena that open up radically new horizons in our quest to understand the origins of everything.

Unfortunately, clear signs of these closed loops of space and time have not yet been seen in the CMB. Before you scream “Case closed and where’s my side of Hungarian garlic bread?”, members of the COMPACT Collaboration say we shouldn’t be so hasty.

in Editorial postThe team argues that some strangely shaped universes built on the more twisted shapes of the triple ring are still compatible with the CMB.

While a regular cake has problems at certain scales, we can’t easily rule out torus versions that distort light in a way that distorts the patterns but retains the connection.

Searching for these connections could reveal strange features of the general shape of our universe, perhaps with twists and turns that require new physical explanations.

maybe Homer Simpson theory That interesting Stephen Hawking cartoon wasn’t silly at all.

This research was published in Physical review letters.