Could the Universe be shaped like a medieval horn? It may sound like a surrealist’s dream, but according to Frank Steiner at the University of Ulm in Germany, recent observations hint that the cosmos is stretched out into a long funnel, with a narrow tube at one end flaring out into a bell.

It would also mean that space is finite. If you could fly towards the flared end in a spaceship, at some point you would find yourself flying back in on the other side of the horn.

The model could explain the lack of hot or cold blobs in the microwave background radiation more than about 60 degrees across and the elliptical pattern of the smallest blobs on microwave sky maps.