Copernican Principle, 1532-2013, RIP- Why Cosmology Is About to Get Interesting

Planck has reported.

The Axis of Evil is real.

The Copernican Principle (which is the irreducible, foundational assumption of modern cosmology) has been observationally falsified.

The universe's largest visible structure is aligned in completely inexplicable ways with supposedly insignificant Earth.

This is now established, scientific, observational fact.

"The Principle" is now the one movie that you really must see this year, since it is only every few centuries or so that the foundational assumption governing our entire worldview comes crashing down.

The ESA press release includes (suitably buried under paragraphs of reassurances that almost everything fits)..........

“The fact that Planck has made such a significant detection of these anomalies erases any doubts about their reality; it can no longer be said that they are artefacts of the measurements. They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation,” says Paolo Natoli of the University of Ferrara, Italy.

“Imagine investigating the foundations of a house and finding that parts of them are weak. You might not know whether the weaknesses will eventually topple the house, but you’d probably start looking for ways to reinforce it pretty quickly all the same,” adds François Bouchet of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.

All you powers shake.

Can't you feel the way they tremble?

UPDATE 3/22:

Following quotes from Planck Results paper XXIII "Isotropy and statistics"

There are 7 distinct anomalies reported in addition to the mutual alignment of quadrupole and octupole: 

"the low variance (Sect. 5.2), hemispherical asymmetry (Sect. 5.3), phase correlations (Sect. 5.4), dipolar power modulation (Sect. 5.5), generalized power modulation (Sect. 5.6), parity asymmetry (Sect. 5.7) and the Cold Spot (Sect. 5.8). Each of these anomalies may represent different violations of the fundamental properties of isotropy and/or Gaussianity of the CMB data which are assumed in the estimation of the CMB power".

There is a distinct angular power asymmetry between the north and south hemispheres, with a "remarkable" lack of power in the direction of the north ecliptic pole:

the observed properties of the Planck data are consistent with a remarkable lack of power in a direction towards the north ecliptic pole, consistent with the simpler one-point statistics presented in Sect. 5.2."

There is "a highly significant detection of both non-Gaussianities and anisotropies":

"We detect pronounced signatures for both non- Gaussianities and anisotropies........a highly significant detection of both non-Gaussianities and anisotropies in the Planck data, consistent with those obtained previously with WMAP data .......the asymmetry was found to be highly significant for the whole range l=2−600."

 There is an odd parity preference in the data, which indicates the low quadrupole power is not an isolated anomaly:

"Therefore, the odd parity preference cannot simply be attributed to the low quadrupole power. It is plausible the low quadrupole power is not an isolated anomaly, but that it shares an origin with the odd parity preference"

 There is evidence of anisotropy on large angular scales "which could have profound implications for cosmology":

"In particular, there is evidence for a violation of statistical isotropy at least on large angular scales in the context of the Planck fiducial sky model........In addition, there is evidence from such fits that the low-l spectrum of the Planck data departs from the fiducial spectrum in both amplitude and slope. These results could have profound implications for cosmology. "

The CMB is "manifestly non-Gaussian and anisotropic", but the anomalies are not related to galactic foregrounds or contamination: 

"The microwave sky is manifestly non-Gaussian and anisotropic, with known contributions from Galactic astrophys- ical foregrounds, lensing of CMB anistropies by the intervening matter distribution, and the ISW. However, the excellent per- formances of the component separation algorithms used here in rejecting diffuse foregrounds argues strongly against known Galactic emission as the source of the anomalies."