Nuclear Reactors Might Give Clues About Early Universe |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Thursday, 09 June 2005 21:51 |
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Nil Basse, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that nuclear fusion reactors could be used to study what the Universe was like just after the Big Bang. Basse, who studies turbulence in the plasma created in fusion reactors, noticed that the plasma created inside these reactors is distributed in a way that is very similar to the way galaxies are distributed in todays Universe. When looking at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which is mapping a quarter of the sky in detail, Basse noticed that the mathematical equation that governs the distribution of voids and galaxies is almost exactly like the equation that describes the millimeter-sized knots and clots of plasma in the Wendelstein 7-AS stellarator fusion reactor in Garching, Germany. Basse states that the way galaxies are distributed today could be the result of variations in the density of plasma after the Big Bang. Therefore, stellarator reactors could be used as models of the early universe.
However, Daniel Eisenstein, a cosmologist at the University of Tucson who works on the SDSS project, says that the type of plasma described by Basse existed for only a millisecond after the Big Bang, too soon to influence the large-scale structures that exist in todays Universe. The largest structures that could have arisen because of any such primordial density variations would only stretch a few light-years across today, according to Eisensteins calculations. Eisenstein also claims that it is hard to reconcile Basses argument with the results of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has mapped the distribution of the oldest light in the Universe, dating back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The WMAPs picture of the Universe shows density fluctuations that are very different from those on the SDSS map.
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