How to make an origami universe


Click on the image to find out what it all means (Image: Dave Stock)


The rules by which gravity sculpts the cosmos are mirrored in the Japanese art of paper folding – we show you how to do it yourself


OUR universe was shaped by origami. Gravity took a primordial paper sheet and folded it to form galaxies, thus bringing light and life to the cosmos.


This original take on the creation myth is more than just empty metaphor. One astrophysicist is discovering how origami can tell us a few things about how galaxies are created, why they tend to spin in unison – and how in their early days they may have been nested within vast, dark polygons.


Mark Neyrinck of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, studies how galaxies and other structures form. Specifically, he looks at how dense spots of invisible dark matter ...


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