No matter how elegant your theory is, experimental data will have the last word.
And the unusual orbit of Mercuryprovided a spectacular confirmationof the theory of general relativity.
In fact, our entire understanding of the universe is built on observed, unexpected anomalies.
Though the universe has four dimensions, including time.
According to Albert Einsteinstheory of general relativity, mass warps space and time around it.
The Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations from the seven-year WMAP data over the sky.
Such a universe is perfectly compatible with general relativity.
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Not all cosmologists are convinced by a closed universe though previous studies havesuggested the cosmos is indeed flat.
First of all, we have to revise a fundamental cornerstone of cosmology the theory of cosmological inflation.
Inflation solves the problem because it means that far-flung regions of the universe would once have been connected.
If the universe is closed, standard inflation is in trouble.
And that means we lose our standard explanation for why the universe has the structure it has.
Possible shapes of the universe: top one is curved and closed, as suggested in the new study.
This all boils down to a real crisis for cosmology, as we say in our paper.
Could we be wrong?
It is certainly possible that we turn out to be wrong.
But there is one main reason, in our opinion, why this anomaly should not be merely discarded.
Here we are slightly above three sigmas, so we are clearly below this acceptance level.
Their existence can explain many astrophysical observations.
Instead, these substances belong to the area of unknown physics.
Nobody has ever seen either dark matter, dark energy or inflation in the laboratory or elsewhere.
