The universe is the same everywhere we look—even more than cosmologists predicted
Wednesday, August 5, 2020 - 11:50
in Astronomy & Space
No matter which direction you look in the universe, the view is basically the same if you look far enough. Our local neighborhood is populated with bright nebulae, star clusters and dark clouds of gas and dust. There are more stars toward the center of the Milky Way than there are in other directions. But across millions and billions of light-years, galaxies cluster evenly in all directions, and everything starts to look the same. In astronomy, we say the universe is homogeneous and isotropic. Put another way, the universe is smooth.