New research from University College London suggests that the universe is indeed "isotropic," the same in all directions. Cosmologists Daniela Saadeh and Andrew Pontzen analyzed cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from the Big Bang for any patterns that would indicate "a special direction in space." From the journal Science:
There is no spin axis or any other special direction in space. In fact, they estimate that there is only a one-in-121,000 chance of a preferred direction—the best evidence yet for an isotropic universe....
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus knocked Earth and humanity from the supposed center of the universe by noting that Earth goes around the sun, not the other way around. That observation gave birth to the Copernican principle, which holds that we have no special place in the infinite, centerless universe. In the early 20th century, with the advent of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and the observation that the universe is expanding in all directions, that idea evolved into the cosmological principle, which assumes that the universe is the same everywhere and in every direction. In fancier terms, the universe is both homogeneous and isotropic....
"It’s official: You’re lost in a directionless universe" by Adrian Cho (Science)
NASA image: The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) data. The image reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. The signal from the our Galaxy was subtracted using the multi-frequency data. This image shows a temperature range of ± 200 microKelvin.
