No big surprise. Planck has mapped the cosmic microwave background to great precision, but found nothing clearly incompatible with the standard cosmology.
Credit: ESA
Posted on 03/23/2013 10:44:05 PM PDT by neverdem
If the universe were ice cream, it would be vanilla. That's the take-home message from researchers working with the European Space Agency's orbiting Planck observatory, who today released the most precise measurements yet of the afterglow of the big bang—the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The new data from Planck confirm cosmologists' standard model of how the universe sprang into existence and what it's made of. That may disappoint scientists who were hoping for new puzzles that would lead to a deeper understanding.
"We're always hoping to find new things," says Glenn Starkman, a theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who does not work on Planck. "But we're finding that our model is really, really good—maybe disappointingly good." Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, agrees. "The sensational news is that there is no sensational news," he says.
Cosmology's standard model goes a bit like this. The universe sprang into existence instantaneously in the big bang as a hot, dense soup of matter and energy. Then, in the first 10-30 seconds, space itself expanded much faster than light speed. That growth spurt, known as inflation, had two main effects. First, it smoothed the universe out and rendered it geometrically "flat" on the largest scales. At the same time, it greatly magnified tiny quantum fluctuations in the density of hot matter and energy. These density fluctuations then left tiny variations in the temperature of the CMB across the sky and, much later, seeded the formation of the galaxies. Like other CMB missions before it, Planck, which was launched in 2009, studied these variations.
From studies of the CMB and other measurements, cosmologists have also deduced the composition of the universe. Planck refines those measurements, particularly those of NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which collected data from 2001 to 2010. According to Planck, the universe consists of 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% mysterious dark matter that has revealed itself through only its gravity, and 68.3% weird, space-stretching dark energy. Those numbers amount to roughly 3% more dark energy and 3% less dark matter than WMAP's result. The Planck team also pegs the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, 100 million years older than WMAP found.
All in all, the results fit the expectation of the standard model of cosmology almost perfectly, reported George Efstathiou, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and a Planck team member, at a press briefing in Paris. "If I were an inflationary cosmologist, I would be very happy and thinking about a Nobel," Efstathiou said. Inflation was invented by Alan Guth, a physicist and cosmologist who is now at MIT.
More important, however, is what Efstathiou didn't say. Scientists had a short list of things that they had hoped Planck would find. For example, its measurements could have shown that a weird type of particle called a sterile neutrino existed, that the variations in the CMB weren't random in a particular way, that the original distribution of density fluctuations didn't jibe with the simplest model of inflation, or that space isn't really flat. But Efstathiou mentioned no such evidence. "These changes are not favored by the Planck data," he said. "The data don't want any of these things."
Still, there is some hope for new puzzles, Efstathiou said. Researchers break the mottled CMB down into superimposed patterns of larger and smaller spots, much as a musical chord can be broken down into individual notes. And at larger, angular scales there appear to be some anomalies, Efstathiou says. For example, the northern half of the sky appears to have slightly stronger large-scale variations than the southern half.
Such anomalies had been seen before in the WMAP data. The fact that they exist in the Planck data too means they must be real, Starkman says. "If you had made a mistake with WMAP, you wouldn't expect Planck to see it," he says. Tegmark agrees and says that the large-scale anomalies could provide clues to how inflation began. "Maybe the universe is trying to tell us something," he says. "I think we should start to take this more seriously now."
It's not clear that the anomalies mean anything, however. The CMB is the product of a random process, so the anomalies could simply be statistical flukes. Alas, with the CMB and the big bang, researchers can't redo the experiment to see if the effect goes away.
Heh...
Their whole universe was in a hot, dense state.
A little bit of science makes God’s existence all the more fascinating.
Science fiction MUST be very logical, else whats the point..
Reality need not be logical at all.. nothing to prove..
Liberals have used first the public schools, books and newspapers, with then TV, movies and other means to spread their propaganda for about as long as this country has existed. As time has passed, they have become ever more organized and sophisticated, with little or no thought to the morality of their goals or methods.
I disagree... liberals have a morality.. dictated by their God..
Their god is givernment.. called by several names..
It’s a Wizard of Oz Story..
AND republicans are Dorothy, libertarians are ToTo..
democrats are munchkins..
I believe that morality comes from God. There is no other.
See what happens when you mix sodium bicarbonate and Acetic acid?
Insufficiently bare....
You can have your “fiction”. I’ll stick to the Bible, and science.
That's humerous enough, but why 4ft? Why not 40, 400, or 4,000?
Absolutely. The idea is to start with the observed acceleration of the stars showing space's expansion, fudge in the measured mass/energy, and figure back a start point:
Hawkings came up with a beach ball size beginning, someone else said a golf ball, and I found another guy said more like a soft ball. Anyway you cut it they got a lot of balls doing their measurements from outside of spacetime --they're using God's tape measure without even asking to borrow it. If they'd have been honest and measured while inside the universe when everything was traveling light speed, then all distances would have shrunk to zero.
More like plants and rocks --they stay still.
Anything moving has to give up linear time and put up with shrinking (non-linear) time. If you got a space ship that sped up by 22 mph every second then it would feel just like earth's gravity was pushing you back. Riding that sucker for about 25 years would make your speed be so high that your time would slow to the point that you'd watch the earth die of old age at 5 billion earth years later. In fact, if your space ship could speed up at a faster rate then you could ride around while the entire universe fades away for all eternity.
...humans have a distinct problem with INFINITY.. or anything “eternal”...
Naw, eternity just isn't all that it's cranked up to be.
As one link (concerning "electrical universe') provided earlier pointed towards...the very observations themselves which are used in the calculations, could well be themselves fundamentally skewed.
The question being is there such a thing as 'dark energy' or is there simply some wrong with how we're looking at things. Similar to how my old Chem1A prof complained about the 'neutrino', saying it was just a fudge excuse to cover up an error in the model. What we know now is that using the idea of neutrinos has come in pretty handy over the years.
We'll see how this 'dark energy' thing works out...
See? they don't call it "dark" for nothing. So...using what flashlight? Were still waiting for it to be invented --- or accepted if it's already around, just underpowered at present. Oh, and something [figuratively] along the lines of these thingys, maybe; 
Insufficiently bare....
Thats what the King with no clothes was..
Are we talking here wearing Tux jacket with no pants or shirt?
Naw, eternity just isn’t all that it’s cranked up to be.
Good point I have a few people that should be destined for non eternity.. whatever that is..
Is non eternity based in Detroit?..
I believe that morality comes from God. There is no other.
I know several people with a personal morality they refuse to follow..
They have their own morality and will not follow it..
They don’t like yours OR theirs..
Interesting.. AND if your wrong then I've listened to the wrong primate in the wrong tree.. making grunting sounds..
WHich is cool, I like animals as long as they don't bite me..
...if your wrong ...
This is something you're already dealing with in your own life; one example is the GPS in your car that has chips to adjust for this space time effect. My being right or wrong doesn't matter.
Thats pretty much Barry Half-Whites problem as well..
He don't connect accuracy to any of his decisions..
Like: You didn't build that others made it possible for you..
Whats correct to some is merely a step in the right direction to others..
Like: Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road.. i.e. naive Utopian "Red shoe clickings"..
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