The universe may be lopsided – new research

The shape of the universe is not something we often think about. But my colleagues and I have published a new study suggests it could be asymmetric or lopsided, meaning not the same in every direction.

Should we care about this? Well, today’s “standard cosmological model” – which describes the dynamics and structure of the entire cosmos – rests squarely on the assumption that it is isotropic (looks the same in all directions), and homogeneous when averaged on large scales.

But several so-called “tensions” – or disagreements in the data – pose challenges to this idea of a uniform universe.

We have just published a paper looking at one of the most significant of these tensions, called the cosmic dipole anomaly. We conclude that the cosmic dipole anomaly poses a serious challenge to the most widely accepted description of the universe, the standard cosmological model (also called the Lambda-CDM model).

So what is the cosmic dipole anomaly and why is it such a problem for attempts to give a detailed account of the cosmos?

Let’s start with the

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