A spectacular claim about the structure of the universe may be rapidly unraveling. Two weeks ago, a pair of cosmologists reported that, on the largest scales, the distribution of the galaxies is stringier than standard theory assumes. However, last week another cosmologist posted a preprint to the arXiv server that suggests the tantalizing signal is an artifact produced by mixing different measures of cosmic distance.

“They appear to have confused two distance measures, and that makes a difference,” says Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki, the author of the new paper. “Basically, the structure they see is in fact smaller than they believe it is.” Francesco Sylos Labini of the Enrico Fermi Center for Study and Research, the lead author of the original claim, which appeared in Nature, acknowledges the error and says he and his co-author are redoing their analysis.

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/surprising-claim-superstringy-universe-may-be-based-mistake

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