Does the universe prefer one direction over another?

Cosmic isotropy—the assumption that the universe looks the same in all directions—underpins modern cosmology, but it's never been rigorously tested at cosmic scales. This team used 244 gamma-ray bursts with a standard brightness-energy relation to search for directional bias in the universe. Comparing their results to supernovae data, they showed that larger GRB samples effectively filter out artifacts from uneven sky coverage, making gamma-ray bursts a viable tool for genuinely testing whether the cosmos has a preferred direction.