gantuan radio telescope called the Square Kilometre Array, either in Australia or Southern Africa, which would allow us to measure the positions of one billion galaxies. Galaxies that have clumped together can be seen as proxies for the hot and cold spots in the CMB, so the net result is akin to sampling the state of the universe at many different times, from which we can determine the geometry with greater accuracy.
And a new satellite mission, run by NASA and the European Space Agency, will measure how dark energy affects the evolution and interactions between galaxies out to tremendous distances.
These projects will be up and running within a decade. In the meantime, other smaller projects are chipping away at our ignorance. Indeed, this new age of discovery and exploration will bear fruits which, hopefully, will one day enable us to understand the geometry of the universe. It is just going to take a bit longer than we originally thought.
Pedro Ferreira is a cosmologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and author of The State of the Universe (Phoenix, 2006)
This article originally appeared on New Scientist.