Sometimes it seems that the only thing expanding faster than the universe is cosmologists' bewilderment. Maybe, the researchers say, it is not as random as normally assumed. The clumping shows up in the snapshot of the infant universe provided by the cosmic microwave background radiation. The radiation has an average temperature of 2.7 kelvins, with deviations of 30 or so microkelvins in different parts of the sky representing slight variations in the density of matter.
Inflation is driven by a quantum field that generates a kind of antigravity, bloating space.
This field fades away, but to have the desired effect, it must do so slowly. That gives the field plenty of time to try to reach the same value at each point in space. It is, in a sense, the most random that random can be. But there's always someone who spoils the curve. In principle, their conclusions are consistent with the earlier null results because they look for different types of deviations from the bell curve.