But in the whack-a-mole world of cosmology, this solution only raised another problem. The universe today is quite obviously not uniform — it is full of giant lumps called stars and galaxies. How did they arise?

Inflation offered an answer for that too: Whatever force drove inflation would have been subjected to the randomness of quantum mechanics, the weird rules that govern subatomic physics. The result would be submicroscopic irregularities or fluctuations, teeny-tiny lumps of hot and cold. Over cosmic time these would grow, as gravity drew them into the majestic clouds of stars we call home . The theory, if true, offered a stunning unification of the very large and the very small — of the random subatomic realm and the galumphing, space-bending world of Einstein.

But a decade of more and more sensitive observations failed to find any hot spots or lumps; the cosmic gravy had been very finely stirred, and the elegant notion of inflation seemed doomed. Then, in 1992, Dr. Smoot reported that data from a satellite experiment called the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, revealed a pattern of minuscule temperature variations in the gravy, amounting to 500 millionths of a degree Celsius , in the range of what inflation had predicted. The gravy had lumps after all!

Subsequent experiments with balloons, radio telescopes and space missions, such as NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Project, or WMAP, and the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope, have sifted and studied those lumps and the surrounding gravy of energy sufficiently to sketch a detailed portrait of the infant cosmos roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Using this data, astronomers have been able to come up with a complete recipe for how the universe came to be. The so-called Standard Model answers all the questions that scientists have traditionally argued about: how big and old the universe is, how fast it is expanding, how the stars and galaxies evolved and grew, and how the cosmos will eventually end.

Lately, however, cracks have developed in this model and some astronomers have complained that maybe some ingredients have been left out of the recipe. For instance, their increasingly precise measurements of the cosmic expansion rate, or Hubble constant, using different techniques, don’t quite agree.

Moreover, a trio of astronomers recently suggested that the universe is even lumpier and denser than the standard recipe prescribes, based on a recent analysis of the Planck data. The cosmic gravy is thicker than was thought. This would have a dramatic effect on the shape and fate of the cosmos.