 A "Dodecahedral" Universe?
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Oct. 8, 2003 — A team of astrophysicists have taken a kick at the conventional view that the Universe is flat and endless, suggesting instead that the cosmos is shaped like — a soccer ball.
The notion of a universe made of curved pentagon-shaped panels is derived from a satellite mapping of the radiation that was released by the Big Bang billions of years ago and which still washes through space in the form of microwave energy.
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The study, led by New York researcher Jeff Weeks, is based on a reading of temperature fluctuations at the extreme range of the microwave scale, recorded across the sky.
These fluctuations do not fit in with the "Standard Model" of a flat, always expanding Universe, they reported in Thursday's issue of Nature, the British science weekly.
"In an infinite flat space, waves from the Big Bang would fill the Universe on all length scales" in the microwave band, they argued.
The researchers suggest that only a "dodecahedral" — the shape of a soccer-ball — could contain this kind of energy release.
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