WMAP First Year Sky Map: Hints of Poincare Dodecahedral Topology

Abstract

Several analyses of the cosmic microwave background map made by the satellite WMAP suggest that the global shape of a spatial section of the Universe is that of a Poincare dodecahedral space. A summary of some of these analyses and a description of independent tests which should be able to either increase confidence in the hypothesis or else refute it to extremely high significance will be presented.