Why God had a ball making the universe

Where ET might find home Forget life on Mars - ET is much more likely to be lurking near 37Gem. It tops a shortlist of 30 stars that NASA scientists think could be circled by planets capable of sustaining life. It has all the things aliens would need from a sun when setting up home - it is stable, a bit hotter and brighter than our sun and has lots of heavy metals.However,Earthlings will not be visiting their alien neighbouirs just yet - 37 gem is 45 light years away,says New Scientist Magazine.

by Jayne Atherton

God, is seems, loves the beautiful game - when he fashioned the universe he made it the shape of a football. The cosmos is not infinite - but a finite 'soccer ball' of curved pentagons joined together, scientists claimed yesterday. In an attempt to kick into touch all other theories about the shape of the universe, NASA experts said it was 'positively curved' . They described it as like a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting itself . In this closed dodecahedron - a 12-faced object - a spacecraft exiting through one pentagon would re-enter the same region through the opposite face and would meet the same galaxies over and over again. If confirmed, the results would mean the universe is much smaller than believed and about 70 billion light years across. The findings are based on data collected by a NASA spacecraft, the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe, mapping the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Current cosmos theories include one which proposes the Earth's 'local' universe is one of many expanding bubbles. Other observations suggest that it is 'flat' - meaning parallel lines stay the same distance apart and never meet. Another view is that it is spherical but in three dimensions - so if you could look through a very powerful telescope you would see the back of your head. The new theory challenges all those ideas, says leading US mathematician Dr Jeffrey Weeks. 'Since antiquity humans have wondered whether out universe is finite or infinite,' he told journal Nature. 'Now, after more than two millennia of speculation, observational data might finally settle this ancient question.

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