IS OUR spot in the universe somehow special? It is an age-old question, but now there's a way to answer it once and for all - as long as we're patient.
Convention has it that our neck of the woods is very ordinary, based on what's known as the Copernican principle, which states that the cosmos is pretty much the same wherever you go. It suggests space-time is expanding at the same rate in every part of the universe, meaning that the distribution of matter is roughly the same.
Although this makes sense theoretically, nobody has managed to test this assumption definitively. Previous attempts have rested on further assumptions, such as the nature of gravity or how matter is distributed through the universe - in other words, they rely on trusting our cosmological models, which were built on the Copernican principle.
Now Jean-Philippe Uzan of the Paris Astrophysics Institute in ...