Astronomers have developed a new way to test one of the central assumptions of modern cosmology — that the universe behaves uniformly on the largest scales. When applying the method to real observational data, the researchers found tentative signs that this assumption may not fully hold, potentially pointing to new physics beyond the standard cosmological model.
The work combines observations of distant exploding stars and large-scale galaxy surveys to probe whether the universe truly follows a nearly 100-year-old mathematical framework known as Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmology. The analyses revealed mild-but-intriguing deviations from the predictions of the standard model.
