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April 15, 2004

| 'The Secret Sauce' >>

Tales from Deep Space

New Scientist reports that the universe might be shaped like a horn. Like this:

horn-universe.jpg

That shape would fit with data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a satellite the size of a car, launched in 2001, now stationed at a point in space between the Earth and the Sun. It monitors cosmic background radiation, the energy left over from the Big Bang.

Let’s just be clear: It’s a Volvo launched into space that has successfully made its way to a little gravitational cradle a million miles away, and now it’s detecting heat waves 13 billion years old.

And some scientists, looking at that data, are like, “Dude, the universe is totally a horn.”

How is this stuff even possible??

Anyway, the horn shape is pretty cool. The flare at the end has the spatial properties of the video game “Asteroids”: If you fly out beyond the edge of the universe, you just appear on the other side.

It’s still just a hypothesis. Meanwhile, the WMAP satellite is out there, tethered between terra and stella, staring into space, gathering more data.

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Posted April 15, 2004 at 1:31 | Comments (0) | Permasnark
File under: Technosnark
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