Without scientific instruments or knowledge to tell them otherwise, you can forgive ancient humans for initially believing the Earth was flat. After a

The Universe Is a Giant Donut That We Live Inside, New Research Suggests

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2021-07-23 20:00:08

Without scientific instruments or knowledge to tell them otherwise, you can forgive ancient humans for initially believing the Earth was flat. After all, from a human perspective, the world does appear to stretch out before us without suddenly sloping down like a half-pipe. But while this notion has been thoroughly disproven for centuries, a new kind of flat-versus-curved debate has recently captured academic imagination. And this time, scientists are debating the very shape of the universe itself.

In a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server, a team of astrophysicists and cosmologists from Ulm University and the University of Lyon have studied the leftover light from the Big Bang—known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB—and determined that the universe may not be a flat plane, as many scientists currently believe.

“The example in our paper is… a donut shaped universe model,” explained Thomas Buchert , a professor of cosmology at the University of Lyon and coauthor on the new paper, in an email. This shape is also known as a three-torus , Buchert wrote, AKA a three-dimensional donut. The idea that the universe has a torus shape is at the center of some pretty far-out stuff, such as the CIA’s 1980s Gateway report on psychic phenomena .