Domain walls, long a divisive topic in physics, may be ideal explanations for some bizarre cosmic quirks.
“As long as they live for long enough, they will always become large cosmological beasts,” says Ricardo Ferreira, a cosmologist at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He’s not talking about actual beasts but rather about hypothetical humongous sheets of spacetime that could divide one region of the universe from another. Such so-called domain walls are the natural outcome of theories that try to solve some of the deepest mysteries in physics, such as the origins of gravity. As Ferreira says, however, had they formed after the big bang, by today they’d be the dominant source of energy in our universe, and there’s no evidence that’s the case. So any theory invoking their existence has been considered suspect—until now, perhaps.
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