Posted on 10/15/2004 7:53:36 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
New results from an instrument located high in the Chilean Andes are giving Canadian, American and Chilean researchers a clearer view of what the universe looked like in the first moments following the Big Bang.
Cosmologists at U of T's Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), along with fellow researchers from the United States and Chile, are using data from the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) to observe a time in the universe's distant past when atoms were first forming. The findings reveal the first movements between these "seeds" that ultimately led to clusters of early galaxies.
The new data also provides more proof supporting the accuracy of the standard inflationary model of the early universe, which suggests that the universe expanded rapidly in the first instants after the Big Bang. The findings appear in the October 7 online edition of Science Express.
"The long-awaited detection of these tiny signals in the first light of the universe has been made possible thanks to these remarkable technological advances in experiments such as CBI," says University Professor Richard Bond, director of CITA and a co-author of the paper. "It has been our privilege at CITA to be fully engaged as members of the CBI team in unveiling these signals and interpreting their cosmological significance for what has emerged as the standard model of cosmic structure formation and evolution."
CBI is a microwave telescope array made up of 13 separate antennas, each about three feet in diameter and operating in 10 frequency channels. It is located at Llano de Chajnantor, a high plateau in Chile 5,090 metres above sea level, making it by far the most sophisticated scientific instrument ever used at such high altitudes. The telescope is so high that members of the scientific team must carry bottled oxygen to work onsite.
The cosmic background radiation observed by CBI originates from the era just 400,000 years after the Big Bang and provides a wealth of information on the nature of the universe. At this remote epoch none of the familiar structures of the universe existed: there were no galaxies, stars or planets, only tiny density fluctuations. The expanding universe cooled and by 400,000 years after the Big Bang it was cool enough for electrons and protons to combine to form atoms.
The new data was collected by the CBI between September 2002 and May 2004. The results are based on a phenomenon of light known as polarization - CBI picks out the polarized light and it is the details of this light that reveal the motion of the seeds of galaxy clusters.
Working in close partnership with their colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, CITA scientists participated in every aspect of the research, from gathering data at the CBI site to providing complex analysis of the signals using the major supercomputing facilities at CITA.
Anthony Readhead, the principal investigator on the CBI project and a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, says the new polarization results provide strong support for the standard model of the universe as a place in which dark matter and dark energy are much more prevalent than everyday matter. This poses a major problem for physics, according to Readhead, who explains that current physics has no explanation for why dark energy dominates the universe. The researchers are now attempting to refine the polarization observations and studying the total intensity and polarization signals in the hope of finding clues to the nature of the dark matter and dark energy.
Funding for the research was provided by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the California Institute of Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Chilean Center for Astrophysics, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Dark matter and dark energy are also predominant in RATs...
"When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands buttered side down. Therefore, if a slice of toast is strapped to a cat's back, buttered side up, and the animal is then dropped, the two opposing forces will cause it to hover, spinning inches above the ground. If enough toast-laden felines were used, they could form the basis of a high-speed monorail system."
16,700 feet. That's a tough commute to work.
If Alan Greenspan were in charge the early universe wouldn't have been nearly as inflationary.
My personal belief is that dark matter is easy to understand.
Just hard to detect.
We take a paper bag. Put 100 pennies in it. Now dump it on the floor.
Say, just for example, we end up with 47 tails and 53 heads.
The tails are anti-matter and the heads are regular stuff, which, mostly immediately annihalate each other, leaving 6 heads of regular matter.
94 percent of our total mass has been converted to raw energy and neutrinos.
6 percent remains in material form.
There is no law that says when matter condensed out of the primordial whatever it was that anti-matter and regular matter did it equally.
Yes, that's the result of your scenario, but that's not dark matter.
400,000 years to cool off - makes McDonald's coffee seem trivial.
Those have already been accounted for, and they aren't part of the dark matter or dark energy budget. They fall into the category of matter and energy.
For one thing, those things don't "clump" the way dark matter appears to. For another thing, we can measure the neutrino spectrum and the relic free energy, and they are insufficient to account for the effects seen, not just in quantity, but in physical properties.
Now it is obvios I am not a physicist by trade. But I have been studying physics, mostly from the philosophical side for quite a while.
I think whatever we end up finding out will be fundamentally different from what we think it is now. Here are a couple of possibilities:
There is more than one single kind of "mass"
Time is, in fact, really running backwards. Or possibly time is really the inverse of some cosmological number.
There is a time-mass equilvalency.
Staring at the equations gives me a sort of sense that something is wrong or missing.
Just my take. I just generate ideas, and throw them out there. I discovered one of the base equations for the Expansive Non-decelerative Universe theory (Sima, Sukenik, 1989) in 1994 way before I saw their work.
And I'm sticking to that theory that says basically gravity is a topological property of empty space, not a property of mass.
:=}
"The long-awaited detection of these tiny signals in the first light of the universe has been made possible thanks to these remarkable technological advances in experiments such as CBI," says University Professor Richard Bond, director of CITA and a co-author of the paper. "It has been our privilege at CITA to be fully engaged as members of the CBI team in unveiling these signals and interpreting their cosmological significance for what has emerged as the standard model of cosmic structure formation and evolution."
Yeah! And if you play it backwards it says that Paul Mc Cartney is dead.
The universe as a whole is its own frame of reference. The universe was (and still is) changing from a hot, dense, highly concentrated state to a state of lower concentration and temperature. (I'll let Physicist give a more precise answer than I'm capable of.)
"The new data also provides more proof supporting the accuracy of the standard inflationary model of the early universe, ...."
Once again, I invite the BB deniers to go stuff themselves.
Good science post. I wonder if the increasingly rapid expansion of the universe might be partly explained by the fact that everyday trillions of tons of matter (which exerts gravitational pull) is being converted into energy inside of stars. Over time, the total mass of the universe is therefore decreasing, and so is the strength of its gravity. That would mean that the space through which the galaxies are hurtling would become progressively less warped over time- which we percieve as acceleration.
Forgot to include the paragraph code.
I stubbed my toe on this mulling another problem. It is mass/energy and not just mass which bends space. Convert all the mass in a box (or a black hole) to energy and the box/hole's apparent mass from outside is the same.
I was assuming a black hole could vaporize in a new Big Bang if you threw enough matter down into one to (somehow) cook the quarks into pure energy. The hole would supposedly then explode because its huge gravitational field would disappear along with the mass.
But no, it wouldn't. Physicist was quick to correct. Never mind what form is assumed within the singularity (which is pretty well unknown anyway), the energy content is still there and that's what generates the field.
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