Shape of the Universe: Flat or Closed?
It seems that everything we know about the Universe may be fundamentally wrong. So, according to a new study, our Universe can take the form of a giant loop that violates all the laws of physics in the form in which we know it. According to the portal livescience.com, this conclusion was reached by astronomers studying the data of the cosmic microwave background, which in essence, is a weak echo of the Big Bang.
Our Universe may take the form of a curved balloon or a giant loop.
What does the Universe look like?
The opinion of mankind regarding what exactly is our Universe is constantly changing over time. So, an ancient person was sure that the world around us is one big living creature. Representatives of one of the Siberian tribes sincerely believed that the world is a huge deer, and all the people, animals, and birds that live on it are just fleas. Those peoples whose development level was slightly higher than the worldview of the Siberian peoples represented the Universe in the form of an overturned bowl surrounding the Earth from all sides. About two thousand years ago, the most outstanding representatives of the scientific thought of the ancient world, Pythagoras and Aristotle, put forward the theory of geocentrism, according to which our planet was a kind of the center of the Universe. It was around the globe that the sun, moon, countless stars revolved.
Two thousand years after the advent of the theory of the Earth as the center of the Universe, scientists came to the conclusion that our Universe is indeed limited by certain frames and is not infinite at all. Our Universe is curved, gently bending and without disturbing the movement of objects inside it.
However, if you once want to cross the Universe on a superluminal spacecraft, then with a high degree of probability, you will return to the same point from where you started your movement, even if you move in an absolutely perfectly straight line.
Cosmologists call the idea of a curved universe "the theory of a closed universe." Evidence that our Universe really has a closed-form, according to the authors of a study conducted within the walls of the University of Manchester, maybe hidden in the speed of motion of light photons in a constantly expanding Universe. While the scientific community for a long time was dominated by the theory of the so-called "open Universe", where our Universe seemed to be something like a flat sheet of paper, physicists from the UK showed that photons from a flat Universe will move in parallel and independent of each other courses, never interacting with each other. And so it would be if it were not for the strange anomaly, which forces us to completely rethink the "open" theory about the shape of the Universe.
The traditional inflation model of the Universe shows that our Universe is a flat structure. However, new studies prove that this is not so.
The only reliable witness to the Big Bang is officially considered microwave waves that fill the entire space between stars and galaxies. According to recent data, gravity is somehow capable of bending microwaves more than modern physics can explain. The latest calculations obtained by members of the research team from the UK indicate that the data on gravitational curvature really indicate the possibility of the existence of a closed universe, which raises a number of new questions.
So, the possibility of the existence of a universe of this type can lead to the fact that our Universe can take the form of a loop, which in many respects, will make generally accepted theories about the evolution of space simply false. By the way, the famous inflationary model, according to which the Universe is rapidly expanding after the Big Bang, can also be included in the list of such false ideas.
Well, it seems that the fate of the Universe may depend on a couple of calculations that scientists hope to make shortly. If so, then soon, a real revolution in the field of studies of the evolutionary processes of the Universe may await science. While researchers determine the shape of outer space, you can manage to follow me on hubpages, where you will find even more useful information from various fields of science.