Bonus Info for “100-year-old assumption about the universe may soon be overturned”

I had a piece up in New Scientist last week (paywalled, sorry!), about a new analysis that suggests the universe is less homogeneous (more “lumpy”) that most cosmologists believe. The piece was a bit different than my usual. Normally I do what people in the biz call “features”: longer articles about general trends. This was a much more classic “news piece”. The people I interviewed had several papers up in early April, the editors at New Scientist thought they were interesting enough to write about, so I was asked for a short, timely piece with the key takeaways. That means I didn’t have a ton of space for background info. So if you’d like to know more, this post is for you! The 100-year old assumption in the title refers to the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (or FLRW) universe, an idea that first came together in the 1920’s, where cosmologists model the universe as homogeneous and isotropic: the same no matter where, or in which direction, you look. That sounds like a crazy…