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The universe - all that ever was, is or will be - could literally be a horn of plenty, according to German cosmologists. The cosmos could be stretched out like a long trumpet, infinitely long and narrow at one end, finite but flaring out like a horn at the end that humans can see now.

This is the shape of creation, known as a Picard topology, that makes most sense to Professor Frank Steiner, a theoretical physicist at the University of Ulm in Germany.

According to New Scientist today, a funnel-shaped universe best explains the pattern of cosmic background radiation observed when the universe was only about 380,000 years old.

This picture of early radiation, made by Nasa's Wilkinson microwave anistropy probe last year, has already helped answer some key questions about the history of time, space and everything. It helped pin the moment of creation to around 13.7 bn years ago. It helped confirm the proportions of the universe as 4% matter, 23% dark or undetectable matter and 73% something mysterious called quintessence, vacuum energy or dark energy. And it has raised once again the vexing question of the shape of the universe.

Even before cosmologists knew about the Big Bang, they had started worrying about the shape of spacetime. Did it stretch on forever, or was there a boundary? Einstein played with the idea of a negatively curved or saddle-shaped universe. Others wondered if it might be toroidal or doughnut shaped, so that it would seem to go on forever.

Last year, a New York team speculated that the universe might really be quite small, but shaped like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons or soccer balls, so that a journey of 60bn light years in one direction would bring a traveller back to Earth, like a circumnavigation of the globe. Light travels in a straight line through space, but if space was crumpled or folded back on itself, galaxies might be quite close.

Prof Steiner's universal horn is another possible answer to the great spacetime riddle. A spacecraft could go on forever - but if it reached the flared end of the horn, it would start travelling back in on the opposite side. This shape is not the onlyrecent suggestion: a few months ago, a Pennsylvania team proposed a universe that looked like a squashed sphere.

"I made the comment that it is as though God carefully made the universe and then dropped it," says Paul Davies, a cosmologist now based at Macquarie University in Australia. "Until now, most serious cosmological models have assumed simple geometries and topologies: spatially flat and infinite, saddle-shaped and infinite or spherical and finite.

"But that hasn't stopped theorists exploring the properties of all sorts of weirdo shapes. Anyway, the universe can have a shape and still be infinite."

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In the "flat" space of conventional cosmology, small "blobs" - hot and cold spots - in background radiation should be round. But observations show that instead they are ellipses. The curve of a horn-shaped universe can explain this, says Professor Steiner.

The "space" in any small part of the "horn" is saddle-shaped, like a Pringles potato crisp. Such a "negatively curved" space would act as a warped lens, distorting the image around the blobs so they look elliptical to astronomers.

Another property of a "trumpet" universe would be that large blobs more than about 60 degrees across would be absent. So far, scientists have also found this to be the case.

But if the team at Ulm is right, scientists will have to abandon one of the fundamental tenets of cosmology - that all parts of the cosmos are about the same. Holger Then, a member of Professor Steiner's team, told New Scientist : "If one happens to find oneself a long way up the narrow end of the horn, things indeed look very strange, with two very small dimensions."

At an extreme enough point, you would be able to see the back of your own head. Over the next year or so, astronomers will test whether large blobs really are lacking in cosmic microwave background radiation and small ones really are elliptical.

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My note:

It seems that Professor Steiner argues about the possibility of the universe being shaped like a horn (trumpet). Is that true ?

I want to get the answers from astronomers because I will compare them with my knowledge in the teachings of Islam. thanks.