[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post 2664!

Indeed, I would expect the official reaction to be bucketing the observation into the Anthropic Principle rather than attempting to personify the origin.

But with regard to the meaning, the MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations made it clear that the structure of the universe is due to inflation, not to topological defects. Cosmological Patterns and Galaxy Biasing (pdf)

And from Berkeley Lab:

The width and position of the first peak indicate that fluctuations on all scales were already in place at the earliest moments of the universe. A period of rapid expansion in the early moments of the universe could have set these perturbations in place by blowing up microscopic quantum fluctuations to astronomical scales -- seeding the galaxies and nets of galaxies we see today...

Had the structure of the universe been seeded not by inflation but by topological defects, that is by phase changes in the extreme energies of the early universe, the first peak in the CMB power spectrum would have been broader and lacking harmonics.

[donh]

The width and position of the first peak indicate that fluctuations on all scales were already in place at the earliest moments of the universe.

mmm? Still doesn't make God-shouts the obvious first guess; as the article sez: magnified quantum fluctuations. It is amusing to note that this line of reasoning holds that our supercluster's millions of galaxies is the result of something equivalent to an electron-positron annihilation during the pre-inflationary era. Talk about your compound interest, eh?