When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration shows the universe expanding during cosmic dawn with its flip side the dark universe dominated by dark photons and dark matter also evolves. | Credit: Robert Lea created by CanvaThis article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 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.AdvertisementAdvertisementShould 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?AdvertisementAdvertisementLet’s start with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the relic radiation left over from the big bang. The CMB is uniform over the sky to within one part in a hundred thousand.So cosmologists feel confident in modelling the universe using the “maximally symmetric” description of space-time in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This symmetric vision for the universe, where it looks the same everywhere and in all directions, is known as the “FLRW description”.This vastly simplifies the solution of Einstein’s equations and is the basis for the Lambda-CDM model.But there are several important anomalies, including a widely debated one called the Hubble tension. It is named after Edwin Hubble, who is credited with h …
