Space Travel
12, Feb, 2012

Possible Physical Evidence of Cosmic String
Written by spacetravel.org   
Tuesday, 09 August 2005 22:56
Mikhail Sazhin of Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory in Naples, Italy and the Sternberg Institute in Moscow, Russia, and his colleagues have presented evidence that they have found two identical images of the same galaxy close to one another. If this were true, it could be evidence of a cosmic string. According to string theory, cosmic strings are huge counterparts of the strings that were supposed to have given rise to the fundamental particles of matter. String theory suggests that our Universe is a three-dimensional island, or “brane,” and that the Big Bang was caused by our Universe colliding with another three-dimensional brane. The collision would have led to the creation of one-dimensional cosmic strings.

A cosmic string would have so much energy that it would warp space-time around it. If there was a cosmic string between the Earth and a distant galaxy, the warped space-time would create two possible paths for the light from the galaxy to reach the Earth, resulting in two identical images of the galaxy in our sky very close to each other.

In 2004, Sazhin and his colleagues found a pair of seemingly identical galaxies, which they named CSL-1. Many astronomers argued that they could just be two very similar galaxies that happen to be near one another. However, in March 2005, Sazhin’s team, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, discovered that the detailed spectra of the two galaxies are identical.

Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts states that this still is not proof that the two galaxies are identical, and that the Milky Way and Andromeda might have similar spectra. He says that if Sazhin’s team could use their technique to tell those two galaxies apart, it would make their case for the existence of a cosmic string much stronger. Sazhin believes that his team’s technique could be used to distinguish Andromeda from the Milky Way, but says that more work has to be done to demonstrate this.

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