Cosmic Triangles Open a window to the origin of time

Shapes made by objects in the sky may hold clues about the nature of time. Like fossils, astronomical objects are not randomly strewn throughout space. Rather, spatial correlations between the positions of objects such as galaxies tell a detailed story of the ancient past. We look at patterns in space today, and infer a cosmological history in order to explain them. What cosmologists have known for decades is that space is filled with correlated pairs of objects. Pairs of galaxies or of galaxy clusters or superclusters in the universe today. Pairs found at all distances apart. When there's an object at one end cosmologists find this increases the chance that an object also lies at the other end. The simplest explanation for the correlation traces them to pairs of quantum particles that fluctuated into existence as space exponentially expanded at the start of the Big Bang. Pairs of particles that arose early on subsequently moved the farthest apart, yielding pairs of objects far away from each other in the sky today. Particle pairs that arose later separated less and now form closer together pairs of objects. The pairwise correlations seen throughout the sky encode the passage of time- in this case, the very beginning of time. Cosmologists believe that rare quantum fluctuations involving three, four or even more particles should also have occurred during the birth of the universe. These presumably would have yielded more complicated configurations of objects in the sky today; triangular arrangements of galaxies along with quadrilaterals, Pentagon's and other shapes. Telescopes haven't yet spotted these statistically subtle "higher-point" correlations, but finding them would help physicists better understand the first moments of the Big Bang.