'Astrophysicists are known for mind-bending theories that are often too difficult for mere mortals to understand but new research suggesting the universe is actually a closed loop really takes the cake… or, erm, the donut?
An international team of astronomers led by Eleonora Di Valentino of Manchester University pored over a trove of data released last year by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.
Contrary to the popular belief that the universe is flat, Di Valentino and her team came to the conclusion that the universe is, in fact, a curved, closed and inflating sphere, in what she dubbed a “cosmological crisis” that warrants a “drastic rethinking of the current cosmological concordance model.”
As with many things astrophysical, their theory stems from Einstein’s theory of relativity and, more specifically, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, wherein gravity bends the path of light.
The clue for the curved universe cropped up when Di Valentino and her team analyzed Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). CMB is the leftover Big Bang radiation that lingers between stars and galaxies which dates back to around 380,000 years after the universe as we know it came into being. It is the dim background light that would remain if you were to shut off all other light sources in the universe.
The 2018 legacy data for the Planck satellite shows that this CMB is being lensed far more than it should be, according to current cosmological models, in an anomaly known as an ‘Alens.’'
Read more: Thrown for a loop: 'Paradigm-shifting' study claims universe is a closed ring, not flat
