Freely
translated, we know nothing, but are able to winkle out patterns with a low
degree of confidence.
Suppose
some form of lensing event took place between the target area in the sky and
the observing scope. How might this
affect observations? Are we in fact
detecting an important phenomenon between ourselves and this portion of the
sky? Is this replicated elsewhere in the
sky?
Obviously
this has everyone chattering and it is inspiring speculation. The microwave background is isotropic and
finding variation is what science does. That
we may even have a pattern is interesting and may establish and important axis
or heaven forbid, a frame of reference.
Let
us look elsewhere to see if other such patterns exist and if it means anything.
No evidence of
time before Big Bang
Latest research deflates the idea
that the Universe cycles for eternity.
Edwin
Cartlidge
Circular ripples in the cosmic microwave
background have been making waves with theoreticians.NASA
Our view
of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles —
but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before
the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that
concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background
— the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures
of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our
Universe.
The
provocative idea was posited by Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and celebrated theoretical physicist
Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford , UK
To verify
this claim, Gurzadyan examined seven years' worth of data from NASA's Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, calculating the change in
temperature variance within progressively larger rings around more than 10,000
points in the microwave sky. And indeed, he identified a number of rings within
the WMAP data that had a temperature variance that was markedly lower than that
of the surrounding sky.
Cosmic cycle
Most
cosmologists believe that the Universe, and with it space and time, exploded
into being some 13.7 billion years ago at the Big Bang, and that it has been
expanding ever since. A crucial component of the standard cosmological model —
needed to explain why the Universe is so uniform — is the idea that a fraction
of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe underwent a brief period of
extremely rapid expansion known as inflation.
Vahe Gurzadyan and Roger Penrose.V.Gurzadyan, R.Penrose
Penrose,
however, thinks that the Universe's great uniformity instead originates from
before the Big Bang, from the tail end of a previous aeon that saw the Universe
expand to become infinitely large and very smooth. That aeon in turn was born
in a Big Bang that emerged from the end of a still earlier aeon, and so on,
creating a potentially infinite cycle with no beginning and no end.
Now
Gurzadyan and Penrose's idea is being challenged by three independent studies,
all posted on the arXiv server within the past few days, by Ingunn Wehus and
Hans Kristian Eriksen of the University of Oslo2; Adam Moss, Douglas Scott and James
Zibin of the University of British Columbia3 in Vancouver, Canada; and Amir
Hajian of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto,
Ontario4.
All
three groups reproduced Gurzadyan's analysis of the WMAP data and all agree
that the data do contain low-variance circles. Where they part company with the
earlier work is in the significance that they attribute to these circles.
Circles of significance
To gauge this significance, Gurzadyan compared
the observed circles with a simulation of the cosmic microwave background in
which temperature fluctuations were completely scale invariant, meaning that
their abundance was independent of their size. In doing so, he found that there
ought not to be any patterns. But the groups who are critical of his work say
that this is not what the cosmic microwave background is like.
They
point out that the WMAP data clearly show that there are far more hot and cold
spots at smaller angular scales, and that it is therefore wrong to assume that
the microwave sky is isotropic. All three groups searched for circular variance
patterns in simulations of the cosmic microwave background that assume the
basic properties of the inflationary Universe, and all found circles that are
very similar to the ones in the WMAP data.
Moss and
his colleagues even carried out a slight variation of the exercise and found
that both the observational data and the inflationary simulations also contain
concentric regions of low variance in the shape of equilateral triangles.
"The result obtained by Gurzadyan and Penrose does not in any way provide
evidence for Penrose's cyclical model of the Universe over standard inflation,"
says Zibin.
Gurzadyan
dismisses the critical analyses as "absolutely trivial", arguing that
there is bound to be agreement between the standard cosmological model and the
WMAP data "at some confidence level" but that a different model, such
as Penrose's, might fit the data "even better" " — a point he
makes in a response to the three critical papers also posted on arXiv5. However, he is not prepared to state
that the circles constitute evidence of Penrose's model. "We have found
some signatures that carry properties predicted by the model," he says.
·
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