The rules by which gravity sculpts the cosmos are mirrored in the Japanese art of paper folding – we show you how to do it yourself

Here’s one we made earlier – scroll down to find out how to create your own origami universe Dave Stock and Kirstin Kidd

OUR universe was shaped by origami. Gravity took a primordial paper sheet and folded it to form galaxies, thus bringing light and life to the cosmos.

This original take on the creation myth is more than just empty metaphor. One astrophysicist is discovering how origami can tell us a few things about how galaxies are created, why they tend to spin in unison – and how in their early days they may have been nested within vast, dark polygons.

Mark Neyrinck of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, studies how galaxies and other structures form. Specifically, he looks at how dense spots of invisible dark matter suck in enough normal, gassy matter to create galaxies. In 2011, Neyrinck went to a talk by origami master and former physicist Robert Lang. “He described spacecraft solar panels that unfold origamically,” he says. “I wondered if some of the origami mathematics he described could be of use in cosmology too.”

To see why it might be, we must take a trip to the sixth dimension. All matter in the universe has a position in the three dimensions of ordinary space. It also has motion, which can be plotted in an abstract space with three dimensions of its own. Physicists often seek insights by plotting position and motion together in one grand 6D arena called phase space.

Immediately after the big bang, matter was spread almost evenly throughout the three dimensions of position. Although space-time was itself expanding at a tearing pace, …