A cosmologist's delight
2 Apr 2013 by Evoluted New Media
Cosmologists – you’ll no doubt be unsurprised to learn – are quite a hard bunch to please. The questions they ask push the boundaries of what it is currently possible to answer – and often surpass them. Consequently the satisfaction craved by these curious minds is hard, very hard, to come by.
Yet at the tail end of last month a collective smile, albeit tentative, began to creep across their faces. Peculiar then, that the thing which provoked such a response is the same thing that could well render many of the theories proposed by these scientists worthy only of the bin.
A map tracing the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation – the “oldest light” in the sky – has been produced by Europe's Planck Surveyor satellite. In higher resolution than ever before it reveals evidence that at once supports current big bang theory and yet highlights how little we know.
Assembled from 15 months’ worth of data, this rather beautiful map shows minute variations in the temperature of the microwave light which bathes the universe. It is this which forms the fingerprint of what happened a millionth of a billionth, of a billionth, of a billionth of a second after the big bang. And it has already shown that the universe is not only older than previously thought, but that there is more matter and less dark energy contained within it.
There are other anomalies with current thinking as well. An asymmetry in temperature fluctuations – such that the southern hemisphere is warmer than the north suggests unknown complexity, as does a surprising cold spot ostentatiously peering out from the oval map.
All this perhaps explains the cosmologists’ delight. The map has confirmed much of what they suspected, but shows there are many mysteries still to solve. In trying to explain the nuances of this remarkable new map I suspect many of them will begin to uncover novel and exciting physics.
But looking skyward is not the only way to understand universal origins – a careful look to the sub-atomic world can be just as revealing. Indeed to understand a mystery as grand as the origin of the universe, evidence from both ends of this scale spectrum will be required. On p26 we introduce a major particle player in the race to discover the intricacies of the origins of the universe.
