* Astronomy

Variations in the density of hot plasma right after the big bang may have been frozen in the shape and distribution of galaxies that we see today.
This is the mad idea proposed by Nils Basse, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He stumbled upon the striking similarity of the pattern produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) map and turbulence in the plasma created in fusion reactors, his own field of research.



The mathematical equation governing the distribution of voids and galaxies looks remarkably like the one describing the millimetre-sized knots and clots of plasma in the Wendelstein 7-AS "stellarator" fusion reactor in Garching, Germany.

He also proposes that the reactor plasma may be a tool to model and probe the very early universe.

Unfortunately, the large-scale structures that we see today differs greatly from the structure that we find in the very early universe - WMAP data shows us what the universe was like just 300,000 years after the big bang – and it wasn’t like plasma knots.



Another mute point is, of course, that any structure that was present in the hot plasma of the big bang existed only for the first millisecond after the big bang , (after which it inflated) - and because that epoch ended too soon to form the patterns seen, they could not have influence the large scale structure of today's universe.

Daniel Eisenstein, a cosmologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who works on the SDSS project, has calculated that the largest structure that could have arisen because of any such primordial density variations would only stretch a few light years across today.