We’ve just realised our understanding of the universe might be wrong

We’ve thought this one thing about the universe for 100 years (Picture: Getty/Metro) The universe, that 13.8billion-year-old thing we call home, is a weird place. But one thing that has made sense to scientists for the better part of a century is the belief that the cosmos is surprisingly uniform. This is known as the cosmological principle, or the idea that if you took a step back – a very big step back – and took a photo of the universe, it would look smooth and blurry, like you forgot to wear glasses. A paper published in the journal Nature, however, argues this might not be the case. Rather, things look different from every direction you look at from a large scale, and the galaxies line up almost into patterns. While this might not sound like a big deal, if proven, this would change th