PERPLEXING observations beamed back by a NASA spacecraft are fuelling debates about a mystery of biblical proportions - is our universe infinite? This week, a team of scientists announced tantalising hints that the universe is actually relatively small, with a hall-of-mirrors illusion tricking us into thinking that space stretches on forever.
However, work by a second team seems to contradict this, and scientists are now busy trying to resolve the conundrum. "Whether space is finite is something people have been asking since ancient times, and probably before that," says mathematician Jeffrey Weeks from Canton, New York. "If we resolved this and confirmed that space is finite, this would be an enormous step forward in our understanding of nature."
At the centre of the debate are observations by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was launched in 2001. The probe measures temperature ripples in the "cosmic microwave background", the afterglow ...
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