Topic: Are you the center of the Universe?

[sam]

One topic which generated a lot of discussion at the Gravity and Cosmology meeting was the void model of the Universe. The basic argument is simple: the dark energy is an ugly addition to our cosmological standard model, with 70% of the energy density of the Universe some mysterious substance with weird properties. From a theoretical perspective, dark energy has the wrong density by many, many orders of magnitude, and worse, we may never be able to study it directly in the laboratory. Now suppose I told you I had a model which explained all of the observations, was based on general relativity, and appealed to no mysterious dark energy component (but still has dark matter, unfortunately). Sounds tempting, right? This is precisely what John Moffat, Chris Clarkson, Antonio Enea Romano, Chul-Moon Yoo, and others were advocating at the workshop (Kenji Tomita has also done a lot of work on this; the model has been around for decades). There’s one important caveat, however. The void model throws out the homogeneity and isotropy assumption. The Universe is now spherically symmetric, with a big hole in the middle. Even worse, we happen to be very, very close to the center of the hole.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/07/29/are-you-the-center-of-the-universe/

[Clive]

Can't beat a bit of juicy speculation.  Astronomers are better at it than most!   

[Simon]

Well, they make a living out of it!   

[Clive]