futurism.com: According to precise new measurements of the distribution of dark matter and dark energy, scientists conclude that our entire universe is completely flat.
By refining ways to measure dark energy, the force believed to be driving the expansion of our universe, a team of scientists at the University of Portsmouth discovered that the universe can be spatially flat rather than bubble-shaped.
Scientists have previously studied dark energy by tracking distant supernovae. However, now, instead of the traditional approach, Portsmouth scientists have studied more than a million galaxies and quasars. Further, on the basis of their directions of movement and location, a final conclusion was made about the global form of space. The study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The study uses a new technique based on combining cosmic voids - large expanding regions of space containing very few galaxies and a faint imprint of sound waves from the very early Universe known as baryonic acoustic waves that can be seen in the distribution of galaxies. This provides an accurate ruler for measuring the direct effects of dark energy underlying the expansion of the universe.
The results confirm the model of the cosmological constant of dark energy and a spatially flat universe with unprecedented accuracy and strongly refute recent assumptions about positive spatial curvature inferred from measurements of the cosmic microwave background by the Planck satellite.
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Usually, in disputes about the shape of the Earth, supporters of the round model make an incredibly convincing argument about “the teacher at school said there,” but, apparently, astronomers and the University of Portsmouth did not attend this teacher's lessons.
How can the universe be flat if the surrounding world is as it were three-dimensional - it is very difficult to imagine without radical damage to the brain, nevertheless, in general terms, everything can be understood using simplified analogies.
The three-dimensional geometry, inside which we seem to live, is an absolutely illusory thing and is based solely on the properties of furniture that can be placed in the room in one order or another. So, if the sofa is round, then there is no way to put it in a corner in which a square cabinet fits perfectly.
It was on the basis of this experience that Comrade Euclid invented his own geometry, which the teachers teach the unfortunate children. Meanwhile, in the smaller world, the geometry is definitely different. For example, electrons fly in orbits that resemble volumetric eights. In the usual three-dimensional world, nothing flies like that - an object can only move in a circle and the behavior of electrons, protons and smaller particles for us, as creatures of a larger world, is incomprehensible and amazing.
Even more interesting tricks are thrown out by the global topology, in which two perfectly parallel straight lines, which the teacher draws on a blackboard somewhere in a distant, distant galaxy, most likely intersect and the sum of the angles of the triangle (VERY large triangle) is not 180 degrees, but it is not clear how many.
In general, this whole topic is so interesting that a special popular science resource quantamagazine.org even undertook to illustrate it using the example of the surface of a torus, which itself is as if voluminous, but its surface is flat:
As you can see from this figure, if an inhabitant of the two-dimensional world living on the surface of the torus looks in any direction, it will seem to him that his line of sight is a straight line, but in fact it will be a circle.
Since the imaginary "two-dimensional" light travels in a straight line, that is, along the line of sight, all this leads to strange effects. So, if an observer sits in a room and looks around, he will everywhere see exactly the same rooms and himself sitting there:
Now, if all these rules are applied to the “three-dimensional” world, then the observer sitting in the room will see something like this:
That is, wherever this unfortunate person looks, he will see his room everywhere at different times. And this is what we see when we look at the sky. There seem to be trillions of some distant stars and galaxies flying there, and yet it may just be one galaxy, which we see at different periods of its evolution and at different angles.
Or maybe there is not even a galaxy, but one star in general, for example the Sun, the light from which runs in circles. And somehow it is impossible to prove that this is not so while on Earth - as long as Mr. Eratosthenes did not stick his magic wands - in the ground or in some other place.
Now, obviously, it should be considered scientifically proven that the global universe is flat, like a table. But whether it stands on three elephants or is twisted into some kind of complex shape is still unknown and scientists need new experiments.