What if the universe is not as uniform as scientists think?

One of The basic pillars of modernity Cosmology It may be the beginning of the wobble. A He studies Published in the journal Nature found evidence of this universe It may not behave the same way in every direction on the largest observable scales.

“What we found is a network of filaments and massive walls of galaxies that remain aligned and interconnected across billions of light-years,” says Francesco Selous Lapini, director of physics research at the Enrico Fermi Research Center in Italy and lead author of the study.

What should the universe look like?

To explain the result, Psilos uses a much simpler analogy than any mathematical equation. Imagine a map of the universe in which each galaxy is represented by a single point. He explains that if the universe becomes truly uniform on the largest scales, there must come a point at which the map looks essentially the same in every direction. Like a photograph viewed from a distance, its details will gradually fade away until an almost uniform background remains.

But that’s not what Silos and his colleague Marco Galuppo found.

“The idea that the universe becomes statistically uniform on large enough scales is what allows us to describe it using relatively simple mathematical models,” says Silos. However, their observations suggest that the real universe may still be more orderly and directionally organized than this picture assumes.

In other words, the organization of these vast cosmic networks does not disappear as increasingly larger regions of the universe are examined. Rather than gradually fading into a featureless background, the universe’s largest structures retain recognizable patterns even on scales where, according to the standard cosmological model, those patterns should not be detectable.

There is no cosmic arrow but a fixed pattern

However, the researchers stress that this finding requires important qualifications. This does not mean that the universe has one preferred axis or direction.

“We are not claiming that the entire universe has one preferred direction, as if there were a cosmic arrow passing through space,” says Silos. “What we found is much more precise.”

A 3D map of the universe created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Analyzer based on the positions of millions of galaxies. A close-up image shows the cosmic web of threads and voids connecting large-scale structures in the universe.

Courtesy of the ESI/KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R collaboration. Proctor

Instead, the team discovered coherent patterns in the distribution of galaxies that persist over very large distances.

As the size of the universe under observation increases, galaxies should eventually become more difficult to distinguish against a uniform background, just like the blurry image in the previous analogy. “Instead, as we expand our field of vision, new coherent structures continue to emerge,” says Silos. “Instead of converging toward symmetry, the cosmic web remains organized on progressively larger scales.”

The conclusion is the culmination of more than two decades of research. Since the early 2000s, Silos has sought to answer a question rarely tested directly: How do we actually know that the universe becomes homogeneous and isotropic on large enough scales? (An isotropic medium has the same physical properties in every direction.)