The Local Shape of the Universe in the Inflationary Limit

Recent high precision data by WMAP and SDSS have provided strong evidence to suggest that the universe is nearly flat. They are also making it possible to probe the topology of the universe. Motivated by these results, we have recently studied the consequences of taking the inflationary limit, i.e. $|\Omega_0 - 1| << 1$. We have shown that in this limit a generic detectable spherical or hyperbolic topology is locally indistinguishable from either $R^2 x S^1$ or $R x T^2$, irrespective of its global shape. Here we briefly present these results and further discuss their observational implications.