Is Our Universe Lumpy?

Is Our Universe Lumpy?

INTRODUCTION. As mentioned on the page dealing with whether the universe was infinite or not, Tycho Brahe based his reasonings on the fact that the stars were scattered randomly in the heavens, and that there were no great aggregations of stars. Your current project is to determine whether or not this is true.

What you need to do is go out into the pitch-darkness of a clear night far outside of town so as to escape "sky-glow", which is the back reflection of city lights on dust and water vapor in the atmosphere. Look up into the sky and see if you think the stars are rather randomly spaced. As you look around, remember that very distant stars become very faint, and any aggregations of very distant stars will look like a faintly lit haze. You should also consider that aggregations might be near and/or far, and that we ourselves might possibly be in an aggregation. If we are living within an aggregation, the faintly lit haze might fill a fairly large portion of our sky.

So what do you see? If you see no lumps, the sky should look like the picture next to the title. But if you see any aggregations of stars at all, even just one aggregation, the universe is not homogeneously random, but is instead "lumpy" as shown to the left. On the otherhand, it would be that we are close to or in a lump, and then the figure to the right should be more like what you see.

A few ideas you might want to incorporate into your report are:

If you find an aggregation of stars, what might such "lumps" be, in general, called?
If you find that you are living in such a "lump," what is it called.
After you have checked up to see if others agree with what you have seen, you will find that some astronomers think that our universe is indeed lumpy. Do they also think that there are aggregations of lumps? And what are they called? And what is the lump of lumps in which you live called?