"The fan has only two sides but so many facets," he said: "I still like the potential for surprise in each fold, the surging pop-up, the unexpected explosion of material, the universe of volume that you can hide within a single fold".
Voids occupy more than half of the universe's volume, the researchers note, and should make some supernova explosions seem more powerful than they actually are.
In an open universe the total volume of space and the number of galaxies contained in it are infinite.
Einstein's static solution represented a universe of finite volume but with no edges, as space curved back on itself.
Another measure comes from counting the number of clusters of galaxies in the universe to measure the volume of space and the rate at which that volume is increasing.
In that case, as the universe expands and the volume of space increases, astronomers say, the push because of dark energy will also increase, accelerating the galaxies away from one another faster and faster, leading to a dire dark future.
As Bojowald reported online in the 1 July Nature Physics, the model shows that at the moment of the Big Bang, the current universe had a minimum volume that was not zero and carried a huge but finite amount of energy.
Just after the big bang, for example, the entire mass of what is now the observable universe was packed into a volume the size of an atom.
The survey mapped the distribution of galaxies in an unprecedented volume of the Universe, looking eight billion years back in time - more than half the age of the Universe.
It started as a tiny region, but expanded rapidly, like a balloon, to occupy the whole volume of the universe.
