COULD the universe be shaped like a medieval horn? It may sound like a surrealist's dream, but according to Frank Steiner at the University of Ulm in Germany, recent observations hint that the cosmos is stretched out into a long funnel, with a narrow tube at one end flaring out into a bell. It would also mean that space is finite.
Adopting such an apparently outlandish model could explain two puzzling observations. The first is the pattern of hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation, which shows what the universe looked like just 380,000 years after the big bang. It was charted in detail last year by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. WMAP found that the pattern fades on the largest scales: there are no clear hot or cold blobs more than about 60 degrees across.
Steiner and his group claim that a finite, horn-shaped universe fits ...
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