The scientists have analyzed the overall picture of today’s Universe, as it is painted to us by cosmological research, and compared it with the predictions made on the basis of astrophysical theories. They concluded that some of the structures in it are much more complex and intricate than they should be.
Scientific picture of the Universe
Recently, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and their colleagues at the Lawrence Laboratory in Berkeley decided to test how well physical representations can predict the evolution of the Universe on large scales and found some rather unexpected.
To compare this, they took the picture of the Universe as it was at the beginning of its existence and created a model of how it should evolve under the influence of Einstein’s theory of gravity. And then they looked at how well the envisioned structures matched those actually observed by telescopes.
This was made possible by processing and comparing two unprecedentedly large astronomical data sets. The first is the DR6 release from the Atacama Cosmological Telescope. The second is the results of the DESI camera.
Observation of the Universe
The DR6 data release contains observations of cosmic microwave radiation. The captured photons were born when the Universe was only 380,000 years old. The available data shows where irregularities in space already existed.
The DR6 data cover only 23% of the celestial sphere, but that’s plenty. They were the basis for the evolutionary models that showed what our Universe should be like now. With the DESI data, things are a bit more complicated. They show all the galaxies and galaxy clusters we can observe. Therefore, they are best viewed as films that overlap and together carry information about how all the things we see around us actually evolved.
Scientists have begun to compare model data with them, starting from the most distant eras. And it turned out that, at least at first and for quite a long time, the Universe evolved exactly as modern physics suggested. However, about 4 billion years ago, its development began to differ not so drastically, but perceptibly from the predicted one.
The researchers say that the structures at the macro level, that is, galaxy clusters turned out to be more complex and intricate than they were expected to be. This phenomenon is also referred to as excessive clumping.
Scientists cannot yet say what caused this situation. The main version is that dark energy is to blame. It is the same mysterious component of matter that does not manifest itself in any way even through gravitational influence and only accelerates the expansion of the Universe.
According to phys.org
