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COSMOLOGY

Pancakes and fingers in the sky

Nature Astronomy volume 2, pages 942–943 (2018)Cite this article

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The positions and motions of galaxies are dictated by the laws of gravity. A new technique to measure the anisotropy in the three-dimensional redshift distribution of galaxies seriously challenges attempts to go beyond Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

One of the most daunting conundrums for modern physicists is the accelerating expansion of the Universe. In the late nineties, teams of astronomers compared the expected and observed brightness of supernovae, discovering that the Universe’s expansion was accelerating1,2. This observational evidence directly contradicts the deceleration predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The simplest solution is to add a cosmological constant, Λ, to Einstein’s field equations. However, the large discrepancy between its measured and expected value has led physicists to consider exotic scenarios involving either modifications of general relativity or a new form of energy. Writing in Nature Astronomy, Jian-hua He and collaborators3 provide new insights on this dispute by comparing the positions and velocities of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with predictions based on numerical simulations, finding that, on scales of a few megaparsecs, general relativity better describes gravity than the alternative theory of gravity that they consider.

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Fig. 1: An illustration of the effects of peculiar velocities on the inferred spatial distribution of galaxies.

reproduced from ref. 13, IOP

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  1. School of Physics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Federico Bianchini

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  1. Federico Bianchini
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Correspondence to Federico Bianchini.

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Bianchini, F. Pancakes and fingers in the sky. Nat Astron 2, 942–943 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0594-x

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