Abstract
The possibility that we live in a special place in the universe, close to the centre of a large, radially inhomogeneous void, has attracted attention recently as an alternative to dark energy or modified gravity to explain the accelerating universe. We show that the distribution of orientations of galaxy pairs can be used to test the Copernican principle that we are not in a central or special region of Universe. The popular void models cannot fit both the latest Type Ia supernova, cosmic microwave background data and the distribution of orientations of galaxy pairs simultaneously. Our results rule out the void models at the 4σ confidence level as the origin of cosmic acceleration and favour the Copernican principle.
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