as galileon theories, brane cosmologies, the DGP model, and massive gravity and its extensions such as bimetric gravity. Successes In addition to explaining many pre-2000 observations, the model has made a number of successful predictions: notably the existence of the baryon acoustic oscillation feature, discovered in 2005 in the predicted location; and the statistics of weak gravitational lensing, first observed in 2000 by several teams. The polarization of the CMB, discovered in 2002 by DASI, has been successfully predicted by the model: in the 2015 Planck data release, there are seven observed peaks in the temperature (TT) power spectrum, six peaks in the temperature–polarization (TE) cross spectrum, and five peaks in the polarization (EE) spectrum. The six free parameters can be well constrained by the TT spectrum alone, and then the TE and EE spectra can be predicted theoretically to few-percent precision with no further adjustments allowed. Challenges Over the years, numerous simulations of ΛCDM and observations of our universe have been made that challenge the validity of the ΛCDM model, to the point where some cosmologists now believe that the ΛCDM model may be superseded by another standard cosmological model. Lack of detection Extensive searches for dark matter particles have so far shown no well-agreed detection; the dark energy may be almost impossible to detect in a laboratory, and its value is unnaturally small compared to vacuum energy theoretical predictions. Violations of the cosmological principle The ΛCDM model has been shown to satisfy the cosmological principle, which states that, on a large-enough scale, the universe looks the same in all directions (isotropy) and from every location (homogeneity); "the universe looks the same whoever and wherever you are." The cosmological principle exists because when the predecessors of the ΛCDM model were first being developed, there was not sufficient data available to distinguish between more complex anisotropic or inhomogeneous models, so homogeneity and isotropy were assumed to simplify the models, and the assumptions were carried over into the ΛCDM model. However, recent findings have suggested that violations of the cosmological principle, especially of isotropy, exist. These violations have called the ΛCDM model into question, with some authors suggesting that the cosmological principle is now obsolete or that the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric breaks down in the late universe. This has additional implications for the validity of the cosmological constant in the ΛCDM model, as dark energy is implied by observations only if the