🔄From the archive: In theory, our universe can have one of three possible shapes, each one dependent on the curvature of space itself: saddle-shaped (negative curvature), spherical (positive curvature) or flat (no curvature).
This story originally appeared in the December issue ofWhen Galileo Galilei pointed his first telescope to the heavens in 1610, he discovered “congeries of innumerable stars” hidden in the band of light called the Milky Way. Our cosmos grew exponentially that day. Roughly three centuries later, the cosmic bounds exploded once again when astronomers built telescopes big enough to show the Milky Way is just one of many “island universes.
Building bigger telescopes won’t help extend the cosmos anymore. “Telescopes only observe the observable. You can’t see back in time further than the age of the universe,” explains Nobel Prize-winning cosmologist John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who’s also chief scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. “So we are totally limited. We’ve already seen as far as you could possibly imagine.
But starting in the late 1980s, a series of orbiting observatories built to study the CMB made increasingly precise measurements showing that space has no curvature at all. It’s flat to the limits of what astronomers can measure — if it is a sphere, it’s a sphere so huge that even our entire observable universe doesn’t register any curvature.
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