Superclusters Gravity Could Create Axis of Evil |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Sunday, 06 November 2005 13:18 |
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Chris Vale of Fermilab in Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, believes that the axis of evil a mysterious pattern in the cosmic microwave background - is caused by the gravity of a supercluster in our cosmic neighbourhood.
Chris Vale of Fermilab in Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, believes that the axis of evil a mysterious pattern in the cosmic microwave background - is caused by the gravity of a supercluster in our cosmic neighbourhood.
The axis of evil appears in the map of the microwave background (CMB) built up by NASAs Wilkinsons Microwave Anisotropy Probe. As part of their analysis, astronomers break up the temperature variations in the CMB into components called the dipole, the quadrupole and the octupole. If the CMB is really the afterglow of the big bang, the orientations of the hot and cold regions of the quadrupole and octupole should be random. In fact, they are aligned, along the axis of evil.
João Magueijo, a cosmologist at the Imperial College London, and his colleagues, have suggested that this means that there is something wrong with the big bang model. However, Vale has pointed out that the axes of the quadrupole and octupole lie in the same plane, which is perpendicular to the direction of the dipole. Vale thinks the alignment is being caused by the Shapley supercluster, an enormous group of galaxies that lies about 450 million light years away and spans an area of sky at least 1000 times the apparent size of the full moon.
The gravity of the Shapley Supercluster could warp the CMB so that
some of the temperature variation of the dipole could spill over into the quadrupole and the octupole. Vale has developed a computer simulation that models the supercluster as a giant spherical mass. He has found that doing this allows him to replicate the apparent alignment of the quadrupole and octupole. He believes that better observations of the superclusters mass distribution are needed to help him confirm his theory.
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