Hyderabad: Astronomers at Portsmouth have concluded after observation of millions of galaxies that the Universe is “Flat” and not curved as the standard big bang cosmology had assumed. This paper has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.
It may be recalled that Dr. B G Sidharth, Director, B M Birla Science Centre, had in 1997 proposed that the Universe is in fact not static or contracting but rather accelerating driven by Dark Energy. This was confirmed the very next year by astronomers observing Type 1 supernovae. Three teams in fact.
Actually in Dr. Sidharth’s model there is no room for concepts like curvature of space which were a left over of the earlier big bang cosmology. The acceleration or some type of inflation smoothens out the universe. This fact was even noted by Nobel prize winner Sir Tony Leggett. So it does not come as any surprise that the Universe is “flat” even though it may be anathema to most cosmologists.