Is the Universe Different In Different Directions? 29/04/2021 An artist’s impression of how ULAS J1120+0641, a very distant quasar powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, may have looked. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser, CC BY 4.0 Bengaluru: For over a century, cosmologists have assumed that the universe is homogenous and appears the same in all directions. But in the last few years, many physicists and astronomers have challenged this so-called cosmological principle. A group of scientists from the US, the UK, France and India have gathered more evidence that suggests the universe isn’t in fact the same in all directions.