Universe has no sense of direction and isn’t going anywhere particular, scientists confirm

Everything is expanding outwards uniformly – not spinning or stretching towards anything in particular

Monday 26 September 2016 17:13

The R136 star cluster, taken from the Hubble Space Telescope

(NASA / ESA / Paul Crowther, University of Sheffield)

The universe isn’t going anywhere, scientists have confirmed.

A new study shows that the universe is expanding the same way in all directions, not spinning or stretching in any special direction.

That discovery is comforting to the cosmologists who found it – since if the universe was moving in another direction, it would put the standard model of the universe under threat.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

Show all 30

1/30Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013

Nasa

For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU)

Nasa

The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago

The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays

Nasa

From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset

Nasa

Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead — sharing pictures of black holes

Nasa

X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

Nasa

A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory

Nasa

The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later — having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars

Nasa

This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3

This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter

Nasa

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account

Nasa

This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan

Nasa

Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass

Nasa

An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory

Nasa

An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

Nasa

Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack

Nasa

Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station

Nasa/Scott Kelly

The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts

Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity

The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto

The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta

This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way

NASA & ESA

Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014

On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa”

A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan

(NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere

This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

“The finding is the best evidence yet that the universe is the same in all directions,” said first author Daniela Saadeh, from UCL. “Our current understanding of the universe is built on the assumption that it doesn’t prefer one direction over another, but there are actually a huge number of ways that Einstein’s theory of relativity would allow for space to be imbalanced.

“Universes that spin and stretch are entirely possible, so it’s important that we’ve shown ours is fair to all its directions.”

If the universe had been pointing in a particular direction, it would be in contrast with the assumptions of almost every cosmological study. If it didn’t behave identically in every direction, it could undermine a huge number of our existing analyses of the universe.

“We’re very glad that our work vindicates what most cosmologists assume,” said Saadeh in a statement. “For now, cosmology is safe.”

The team made the discovery by studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that is the radiation left over by the big bang. They modelled a number of different scenarios for a spinning or stretching universe and worked out how those might be visible in the CMB – and found that none of them matched up with the real map of the cosmos that comes from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.

“We calculated the different patterns that would be seen in the cosmic microwave background if space has different properties in different directions,” said Saadeh. “Signs might include hot and cold spots from stretching along a particular axis, or even spiral distortions.”

The researchers said that there was a huge number of ways that the universe could be “anisotropic”, or pointing in a particular direction. That made the work of comparing the possible examples to the real one extra difficult.

✕

China's great space telescope begins operations

There’s still some possibility that the universe prefers one direction, the scientists said. But the precision of the new study mans that chance is just one in 121,000.

Join our new commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies