Imagine a funhouse mirror that stretches everything vertically: a chair looks huge, though in reality it's just an ordinary one. That's somewhat similar to how astronomers sometimes see distorted images of distant space. Recent debates flared up precisely over the distribution of galaxies in the Universe.

Back in the day, Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître established that on very large scales, the cosmos is homogeneous and has no preferred directions. But in the spectroscopic survey DESI — which measures the redshift of distant objects — someone glimpsed a giant wall of galaxies billions of light-years long. Such a find would have called the foundations of cosmology into question.

A new investigation compared real data with a computer simulation of the Universe called FLAMINGO, which accounts for dark matter and dark energy. It turned out that when you convert redshift into distance correctly, the observed picture fits perfectly with predictions based on the Big Bang. The whole drama arose from a mix-up: the authors of the sensation used one type of cosmic 'ruler' instead of another, causing distances to stretch by about one and a half times — as if you measured your waist with a tailor's tape but read the markings as inches instead of centimeters. Once the mistake was corrected, the monster illusion vanished, and the standard picture of the world, confirmed by the Hubble telescope, remained unshaken.