Cosmos explicitly fractal

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14200-galaxy-map-hints-at-fractal-universe.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

(((Old news here, but that's an interesting universe. WHY is it "fractal"?)))

Link: Galaxy map hints at fractal universe - space - 25 June 2008 - New Scientist Space.

roup together to form galaxies, galaxies clump together to form clusters, and clusters amass into superclusters.

The point of contention, however, is what happens at even larger scales. According to most physicists, this Russian doll-style clustering comes to an end and the universe, on large scales, becomes homogeneous.

But a small team of physicists, including Francesco Sylos Labini of the Enrico Fermi Centre in Rome and Luciano Pietronero of the University of Rome argue that the data shows the opposite: the universe continues to look fractal as far out as our telescopes can see. (((It's an ITALIAN fractal universe. Beat that!)))

(((And it s fractally Russian, too!))) (...) According to their latest paper, which has been submitted to Nature Physics, Sylos Labini and Pietronero, along with physicists Nikolay Vasilyev and Yurij Baryshev of St Petersburg State University in Russia, argue that the new data shows that the galaxies exhibit an explicitly fractal pattern up to a scale of about 100 million light years.

And they say if the universe does become homogeneous at some point, it has to be on a scale larger than a staggering 300 million light years across. That's because even at that scale, they still observe large fluctuations – a cluster here, a void there – in the matter distribution....