Here's an interesting idea that could explain some of the more puzzling features of our universe.
Cosmologists have long found evidence that the universe began in a big bang event and then expanded equally in all directions to become the cosmos we see today. They can see that distant galaxies are moving away from us, suggesting that the universe is expanding, and they can even see the echo of the big bang that caused this expansion.
That this echo seems evenly distributed around us has helped to back up the idea that we live in an ordinary part of the Universe that is more or less the same as every other part.
Neat and simple!
But in recent years, a number of strange observations have begun to make cosmologists think again. First, they've discovered that the universe is not just expanding but accelerating away form us. The evidence comes from observations of distant supernovas. And second, they've found that a closer examination of the echo of the big bang shows that it isn't evenly distributed at all but stronger in some directions than in others, the so-called Axis of Evil.
Nobody has come up for a satisfactory explanation of these observations, which leaves physicists in a bind. Not least because the observations imply that the universe is not more or less the same everywhere, that there are preferred directions and that the laws of physics may be different elsewhere in ways that are hard ot imagine and even more difficult to measure.
That's not so neat and not so simple.
Today, however, Edmund Schluessel at Cardiff University in Wales says that gravitational waves can explain all these observations. These are waves in the fabric of spacetime created by momentous events such as the collision of black holes and even the big bang itself.
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