Posted on 10/25/2007 12:12:12 PM PDT by LibWhacker
A ‘defect’ in spacetime may be one of the most curious findings of the data collected from the Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe. What WMAP gave us is the earliest image of the cosmos we have in our repertoire, showing temperature changes across the microwave background thought to be the aftereffect of the Big Bang. When Marcos Cruz (Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria) and colleagues found a cold spot in the data, they launched an investigation to determine what in heaven could be causing it.
A random fluctuation in the data? Possibly, but the Spanish and British team studying the cold spot think the odds on that are only about one percent. A cosmic defect would be quite a find, evidence of exotic phase transitions in the infant universe involving the breaking of symmetry between particles. A cooling universe would see a phase transition when quarks, for example, became distinct from electrons and neutrinos. A homely analogy is to a kitchen freezer, where the defects in ice cubes show how irregularly matter behaves when it undergoes phase change.
Neil Turok (Cambridge), a co-author on the study, explained how such defects should form in the 1990s, pointing out that some of them might be visible in the cosmos today. He describes phase changes this way:
“Imagine a large crowd of people with everyone standing. To any person in it, the crowd looks roughly the same in all directions. Now tell them all to lie down. People would tend to lie in the same direction as their neighbours, but over large distances the direction chosen would vary. In some places, people would be unable to decide which was the best direction to lie in: if everyone lies down pointing directly away from you, you are forced to stand. You are now a defect in the symmetry, a texture.”
A cosmic defect, of course, would have occurred at high temperatures and at enormous energy levels for the particles involved, providing useful indicators of fundamental particles and forces as the cosmos evolved. Turok notes that defects called ‘textures’ could have formed as particles separated from the earliest hot plasma. Turok calls a texture “…a three-dimensional object like a blob of energy,” but adds that “…within the blob the energy fields making up the texture are twisted up.”
Further studies will be required to confirm that what the team has found is indeed a texture, but other hypotheses — scattering of the CMB by large galaxy clusters, for example — are looking less likely. Thus a cold spot in the WMAP data, plausibly a defect in the structure of the vacuum, will surely be a hot topic in upcoming research. The paper is Cruz et al., “Feature in the Cosmic Background Radiation Consistent with a Cosmic Texture,” to be published today on the Science Express website.
I hate it when they tell me that.
bkmarked. Thanks.
Since Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, physicists have been pushing the idea of a homogenious universe. These observations seem to contradict it, and yet the physicists cannot bring themselves to admit that the universe is not homogenious.
Something tells me a couple of hundred years of continued observation are in order if we are to begin to figure things out.
It’s obviously caused by global warming!
Bush’s fault!
Hmmmm. I would tend to think the universe is perfect, that is, as designed. If there is a flaw, I’d be more apt to believe it’s our own flaw in understanding.
I’m just taking into account the Manufacturer.
Be careful you’ll raise the ire of the “do you really think God created.. blah blah” crowd.
Worse, galactic cooling
LOL!
LOL, those guys are definitely a defect in the cosmos, thanks.
Dang! Thot I’d burned all them reunion pics....
If you think about it, we are all defects in the cosmos; Each one of us deviates from the median in some way.
You’ll get used to it, trust me.
How fast are we going?
The Earth revolves once a day. Goes around the Sun once a year (more or less). The Sun is orbiting the Milkyway. The Milkyway is orbiting around a common center for a bunch of other galaxies in this cluster. And on top of all that we are moving away from the big bang zero point. Does anyone know how fast we are going?
Maybe all that “dark matter” is on the other side of the universe going away from us. If we are moving away from the center of the universe at 0.51 C and objects on the other side are too, we can not see them. Right?
Since the “whole universe” consisted of only the Milky Way galaxy until 1923, homogeneity of the universe wasn’t a big issue prior to that time. Einstein didn’t have anything to do with these discoveries.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.