https://aiscience.uk/tags/cmb/ Recent content in CMB on AI Science Report Hugo en-us Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0800 https://aiscience.uk/posts/cosmic-topology-universe-shape/ Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0800 https://aiscience.uk/posts/cosmic-topology-universe-shape/ <p>If you could board a spaceship capable of flying in a perfectly straight line forever, what would happen? Common sense says you&rsquo;d travel through endless galaxies, never reaching an edge, never looping back. But common sense might be wrong. The universe could be finite — and if you flew far enough, you might eventually return to where you started, having circumnavigated all of existence like a cosmic Magellan. The question of whether the universe wraps back on itself — its <em>topology</em> — is one of the deepest and most persistently overlooked questions in cosmology. Now, a comprehensive review from the COMPACT Collaboration, invited for publication in <em>Nature Astronomy</em>, lays out everything we know, everything we don&rsquo;t, and the astonishing possibility that the evidence may already be hiding in data we&rsquo;ve already collected.</p>