The world is amazingly smooth.

A brand new measurement shows that the world is less clumpy than predicted, physicists report in a series of newspapers posted July 30 in The discrepancy can sign up at something amiss with scientists’ understanding of the cosmos.

To pin down the cosmic clumpiness, researchers analyzed the orientation of 21 million galaxies using the Kilo-Degree Survey in the Paranal Observatory in Chile. As light from these galaxies flows throughout the world, its trajectory is flexed by enormous things, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This lensing induces the elongated shapes of galaxies to seem slightly aligned, instead of oriented .

When coupled with additional information from other sky surveys, that alignment quantifies just how much the thing in the world is clumped together. The researchers discovered that the world is roughly 10 percent more homogenous, or more straightforward, than predicted according to mild released only after the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. Past results had hinted at the discrepancy, however, the brand new measurement reinforces the event the debate isn’t a fluke (SN: 7/ / 30/19).

When the measurement is right, the mismatch may signal in a pit in the standard model of cosmology, the theory that explains the way the world has shifted over time. When coupled with a similar mystery over how fast the universe is expanding (SN: 7/ / 15/20), physicists are starting to guess that the world is placing them on sight.

“it is a small riddle,” says cosmologist Hendrik Hildebrandt of Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, a coauthor of those research. “Can Be [the universe] simply telling us’You are dumb and you did not do your dimension correctly,’ or’…’Hey, I am more sophisticated than you believed’?”