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Can we trace the universe's initial shape from today's galaxy clusters?

Farnik Nikakhtar, Ravi K. Sheth, Nikhil Padmanabhan, Bruno Lévy, Roya Mohayaee

June 1, 2026

Cosmologists usually assume the early universe was Gaussian, but current theories predict subtle deviations. This work shows how to reconstruct those initial conditions using only observed galaxies as guides, treating unmeasured matter as "dust" with predictable clustering. The method works by mapping galaxies backward through cosmic expansion, letting their biased distribution reveal the non-Gaussian fingerprint.
Published as Optimal Transport Reconstruction of Biased Tracers in Primordial Non-Gaussian Fields arXiv:2606.01529
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