Deep sky survey shows the Universe is a teeny tiny bit smoother than expected

The enormous Dark Energy Survey (or DES) of the sky is yielding scientific results, and while for the most part they seem to align with what is predicted by cosmological models of the Universe's behavior, there are some interesting numbers that seem to indicate the cosmos not exactly what we expect. It's less clumpy.

The DES uses a four-meter telescope in Chile with a ridiculously huge 570-megapixel camera attached to it to take images of large swaths of the sky. Over the past three years — ove...