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Phys. Rev. D 58, 103516 (1998) [5 pages]

Is the Universe infinite or is it just really big?

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Janna Levin, Evan Scannapieco, and Joseph Silk
Center for Particle Astrophysics, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720-7304

Received 28 January 1998; published 27 October 1998

The global geometry of the Universe is in principle as observable an attribute as local curvature. Previous studies have established that if the Universe is wrapped into a flat hypertorus, the simplest compact space, then the fundamental domain must be at least 0.4 times the diameter of the observable Universe. We derive the spectrum of temperature fluctuations for the other five compact, orientable flat spaces and show that the same bound holds for all, although prominent geometric features in sky maps can, in principle, distinguish between these spaces. Our analysis provides the first limits on any of the twisted tori and the hexagonal prisms.

© 1998 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.58.103516
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.58.103516
PACS:
98.80.Hw, 98.70.Vc