“Never erase your past. It shapes who you are today and will help you to be the person you’ll be tomorrow.” –Ziad K. Abdelnour
But even moreso than the fact that we’re shaped by our past, the Universe itself — geometrically — is shaped by its history and composition. You might imagine all sorts of possibilities for how the Universe could have been shaped: positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere, negatively curved like a higher-dimensional saddle, folded back on itself like a donut/torus, or spatially flat on the largest scales, like a giant Cartesian grid.
Image credit: Christopher Vitale of Networkologies and the Pratt Institute.
Yet only one of these possibilities matches up with our observations, something we can probe simply by using our knowledge of how light travels in both flat and curved space, and measuring the CMB, the source of the most distant light in the Universe. The result?
Image credit: Smoot Cosmology Group / Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
A Universe that’s so incredibly flat, it’s indistinguishable from perfection. Go get the whole story for this week’s Ask Ethan!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1JVdJAP
“Never erase your past. It shapes who you are today and will help you to be the person you’ll be tomorrow.” –Ziad K. Abdelnour
But even moreso than the fact that we’re shaped by our past, the Universe itself — geometrically — is shaped by its history and composition. You might imagine all sorts of possibilities for how the Universe could have been shaped: positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere, negatively curved like a higher-dimensional saddle, folded back on itself like a donut/torus, or spatially flat on the largest scales, like a giant Cartesian grid.
Image credit: Christopher Vitale of Networkologies and the Pratt Institute.
Yet only one of these possibilities matches up with our observations, something we can probe simply by using our knowledge of how light travels in both flat and curved space, and measuring the CMB, the source of the most distant light in the Universe. The result?
Image credit: Smoot Cosmology Group / Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
A Universe that’s so incredibly flat, it’s indistinguishable from perfection. Go get the whole story for this week’s Ask Ethan!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1JVdJAP
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