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The cosmic microwave background (CMB or CMBR) is microwave radiation that fills all space in the observable universe. It is a remnant that provides an important source of data on the primordial universe. [1] With a standard optical telescope, the background space between stars and galaxies is almost completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope detects a faint background glow that is almost uniform and is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. The accidental discovery of the CMB in 1965 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s. [2] [3]
CMB is landmark evidence of the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe. In the Big Bang cosmological models, during the earliest periods, the universe was filled with an opaque fog of dense, hot plasma of sub-atomic particles. As the universe expanded, this plasma cooled to the point where protons and electrons combined to form neutral atoms of mostly hydrogen. Unlike the plasma, these atoms could not scatter thermal radiation by Thomson scattering, and so the universe became transparent. [4] Known as the recombination epoch, this decoupling event released photons to travel freely through space – sometimes referred to as relic radiation. [1] However, the photons have grown less energetic due to the cosmological redshift associated with the expansion of the universe. The surface of last scattering refers to a shell at the right distance in space so photons are now received that were originally emitted at the time of decoupling. [5]
The CMB is not completely smooth and uniform, showing a faint anisotropy that can be mapped by sensitive detectors. Ground and space-based experiments such as COBE and WMAP have been used to measure these temperature inhomogeneities. The anisotropy structure is determined by various interactions of matter and photons up to the point of decoupling, which results in a characteristic lumpy pattern that varies with angular scale. The distribution of the anisotropy across the sky has frequency components that can be represented by a power spectrum displaying a sequence of peaks and valleys. The peak values of this spectrum hold important information about the physical properties of the early universe: the first peak determines the overall curvature of the universe, while the second and third peak detail the density of normal matter and so-called dark matter, respectively. Extracting fine details from the CMB data can be challenging, since the emission has undergone modification by foreground features such as galaxy clusters.
Precise measurements of the CMB are critical to cosmology, since any proposed model of the universe must explain this radiation. The CMB has a thermal black body spectrum at a temperature of 2.72548±0.00057 K. [6] The spectral radiance dEν/dν peaks at 160.23 GHz, in the microwave range of frequencies, corresponding to a photon energy of about 6.626×10−4 eV . Alternatively, if spectral radiance is defined as dEλ/dλ, then the peak wavelength is 1.063 mm (282 GHz, 1.168×10−3 eV photons). The glow is very nearly uniform in all directions, but the tiny residual variations show a very specific pattern, the same as that expected of a fairly uniformly distributed hot gas that has expanded to the current size of the universe. In particular, the spectral radiance at different angles of observation in the sky contains small anisotropies, or irregularities, which vary with the size of the region examined. They have been measured in detail, and match what would be expected if small thermal variations, generated by quantum fluctuations of matter in a very tiny space, had expanded to the size of the observable universe we see today. This is a very active field of study, with scientists seeking both better data (for example, the Planck spacecraft) and better interpretations of the initial conditions of expansion. Although many different processes might produce the general form of a black body spectrum, no model other than the Big Bang has yet explained the fluctuations. As a result, most cosmologists consider the Big Bang model of the universe to be the best explanation for the CMB.
The high degree of uniformity throughout the observable universe and its faint but measured anisotropy lend strong support for the Big Bang model in general and the ΛCDM ("Lambda Cold Dark Matter") model in particular. Moreover, the fluctuations are coherent on angular scales that are larger than the apparent cosmological horizon at recombination. Either such coherence is acausally fine-tuned, or cosmic inflation occurred. [7] [8]
Other than the temperature and polarization anisotropy, the CMB frequency spectrum is expected to feature tiny departures from the black-body law known as spectral distortions. These are also at the focus of an active research effort with the hope of a first measurement within the forthcoming decades, as they contain a wealth of information about the primordial universe and the formation of structures at late time. [9]
The cosmic microwave background radiation is an emission of uniform, black body thermal energy coming from all parts of the sky. The radiation is isotropic to roughly one part in 100,000: the root mean square variations are only 18 μK, [11] after subtracting out a dipole anisotropy from the Doppler shift of the background radiation. The latter is caused by the peculiar velocity of the Sun relative to the comoving cosmic rest frame as it moves at 369.82 ± 0.11 km/s towards the constellation Leo (galactic longitude 264.021 ± 0.011, galactic latitude 48.253 ± 0.005). [12] The CMB dipole and aberration at higher multipoles have been measured, consistent with galactic motion. [13]
In the Big Bang model for the formation of the universe, inflationary cosmology predicts that after about 10−37 seconds [14] the nascent universe underwent exponential growth that smoothed out nearly all irregularities. The remaining irregularities were caused by quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field that caused the inflation event. [15] Long before the formation of stars and planets, the early universe was smaller, much hotter and, starting 10−6 seconds after the Big Bang, filled with a uniform glow from its white-hot fog of interacting plasma of photons, electrons, and baryons.
As the universe expanded, adiabatic cooling caused the energy density of the plasma to decrease until it became favorable for electrons to combine with protons, forming hydrogen atoms. This recombination event happened when the temperature was around 3000 K or when the universe was approximately 379,000 years old. [16] As photons did not interact with these electrically neutral atoms, the former began to travel freely through space, resulting in the decoupling of matter and radiation. [17]
The color temperature of the ensemble of decoupled photons has continued to diminish ever since; now down to 2.7260±0.0013 K, [6] it will continue to drop as the universe expands. The intensity of the radiation corresponds to black-body radiation at 2.726 K because red-shifted black-body radiation is just like black-body radiation at a lower temperature. According to the Big Bang model, the radiation from the sky we measure today comes from a spherical surface called the surface of last scattering. This represents the set of locations in space at which the decoupling event is estimated to have occurred [18] and at a point in time such that the photons from that distance have just reached observers. Most of the radiation energy in the universe is in the cosmic microwave background, [19] making up a fraction of roughly 6×10−5 of the total density of the universe. [20]
Two of the greatest successes of the Big Bang theory are its prediction of the almost perfect black body spectrum and its detailed prediction of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. The CMB spectrum has become the most precisely measured black body spectrum in nature. [10]
The energy density of the CMB is 0.260 eV/cm3 (4.17×10−14 J/m3) which yields about 411 photons/cm3. [21]
The cosmic microwave background was first predicted in 1948 by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, in close relation to work performed by Alpher's PhD advisor George Gamow. [22] [23] [24] [25] Alpher and Herman were able to estimate the temperature of the cosmic microwave background to be 5 K, though two years later they re-estimated it at 28 K. This high estimate was due to a misestimate of the Hubble constant by Alfred Behr, which could not be replicated and was later abandoned for the earlier estimate. Although there were several previous estimates of the temperature of space, these estimates had two flaws. First, they were measurements of the effective temperature of space and did not suggest that space was filled with a thermal Planck spectrum. Next, they depend on our being at a special spot at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy and they did not suggest the radiation is isotropic. The estimates would yield very different predictions if Earth happened to be located elsewhere in the universe. [26]
The 1948 results of Alpher and Herman were discussed in many physics settings through about 1955, when both left the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. The mainstream astronomical community, however, was not intrigued at the time by cosmology. Alpher and Herman's prediction was rediscovered by Yakov Zel'dovich in the early 1960s, and independently predicted by Robert Dicke at the same time. The first published recognition of the CMB radiation as a detectable phenomenon appeared in a brief paper by Soviet astrophysicists A. G. Doroshkevich and Igor Novikov, in the spring of 1964. [28] In 1964, David Todd Wilkinson and Peter Roll, Dicke's colleagues at Princeton University, began constructing a Dicke radiometer to measure the cosmic microwave background. [29] In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson at the Crawford Hill location of Bell Telephone Laboratories in nearby Holmdel Township, New Jersey had built a Dicke radiometer that they intended to use for radio astronomy and satellite communication experiments. [27] On 20 May 1964 they made their first measurement clearly showing the presence of the microwave background, [30] with their instrument having an excess 4.2K antenna temperature which they could not account for. After receiving a telephone call from Crawford Hill, Dicke said "Boys, we've been scooped." [2] [31] [32] A meeting between the Princeton and Crawford Hill groups determined that the antenna temperature was indeed due to the microwave background. Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery. [33]
The interpretation of the cosmic microwave background was a controversial issue in the 1960s with some proponents of the steady state theory arguing that the microwave background was the result of scattered starlight from distant galaxies. [34] Using this model, and based on the study of narrow absorption line features in the spectra of stars, the astronomer Andrew McKellar wrote in 1941: "It can be calculated that the 'rotational temperature' of interstellar space is 2 K." [35] However, during the 1970s the consensus was established that the cosmic microwave background is a remnant of the big bang. This was largely because new measurements at a range of frequencies showed that the spectrum was a thermal, black body spectrum, a result that the steady state model was unable to reproduce. [36]
Harrison, Peebles, Yu and Zel'dovich realized that the early universe would require inhomogeneities at the level of 10−4 or 10−5. [37] [38] [39] Rashid Sunyaev later calculated the observable imprint that these inhomogeneities would have on the cosmic microwave background. [40] Increasingly stringent limits on the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background were set by ground-based experiments during the 1980s. RELIKT-1, a Soviet cosmic microwave background anisotropy experiment on board the Prognoz 9 satellite (launched 1 July 1983) gave upper limits on the large-scale anisotropy. The NASA COBE mission clearly confirmed the primary anisotropy with the Differential Microwave Radiometer instrument, publishing their findings in 1992. [41] [42] The team received the Nobel Prize in physics for 2006 for this discovery.
Inspired by the COBE results, a series of ground and balloon-based experiments measured cosmic microwave background anisotropies on smaller angular scales over the next decade. The primary goal of these experiments was to measure the scale of the first acoustic peak, which COBE did not have sufficient resolution to resolve. This peak corresponds to large scale density variations in the early universe that are created by gravitational instabilities, resulting in acoustical oscillations in the plasma. [43] The first peak in the anisotropy was tentatively detected by the MAT/TOCO experiment and the result was confirmed by the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA experiments. [44] [45] [46] These measurements demonstrated that the geometry of the universe is approximately flat, rather than curved. [47] They ruled out cosmic strings as a major component of cosmic structure formation and suggested cosmic inflation was the right theory of structure formation. [48]
The second peak was tentatively detected by several experiments before being definitively detected by WMAP, which has tentatively detected the third peak. [49] As of 2010, several experiments to improve measurements of the polarization and the microwave background on small angular scales are ongoing.[ needs update ] These include DASI, WMAP, BOOMERanG, QUaD, Planck spacecraft, Atacama Cosmology Telescope, South Pole Telescope and the QUIET telescope.
There are challenges to the standard CMB intepretation within the big bang framework. The background temperature of space was predicted by Charles Édouard Guillaume, Arthur Eddington, Erich Regener, Walther Nernst, Gerhard Herzberg, Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, Max Born, and Anthony Peratt, based on a universe without expansion, and prior to the discovery of the CMB. Their predictions were more accurate than big bang models.[ citation needed ] The earliest known estimation of the background temperature of “space” was by Guillaume in 1896. [50]
This paper documents the history of predictions.
Alternative interpretations also fit with the Plasma Universe model advocated by Anthony Peratt, and Eric Lerner, a plasma physicist at LPP Fusion. Lerner wrote The Big Bang Never Happened. He interprets the CMB as "a radio fog of dense plasma filaments." If Lerner is right and the CMB is not a remnant heat signature then it tells us nothing about the age of the universe.[ citation needed ]
The cosmic microwave background radiation and the cosmological redshift-distance relation are together regarded as the best available evidence for the Big Bang event. Measurements of the CMB have made the inflationary Big Bang model the Standard Cosmological Model. [51] The discovery of the CMB in the mid-1960s curtailed interest in alternatives such as the steady state theory. [52]
In the late 1940s Alpher and Herman reasoned that if there was a Big Bang, the expansion of the universe would have stretched the high-energy radiation of the very early universe into the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and down to a temperature of about 5 K. They were slightly off with their estimate, but they had the right idea. They predicted the CMB. It took another 15 years for Penzias and Wilson to discover that the microwave background was actually there. [53]
According to standard cosmology, the CMB gives a snapshot of the hot early universe at the point in time when the temperature dropped enough to allow electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms. This event made the universe nearly transparent to radiation because light was no longer being scattered off free electrons. When this occurred some 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe was about 3,000 K. This corresponds to an ambient energy of about 0.26 eV , which is much less than the 13.6 eV ionization energy of hydrogen. [54] This epoch is generally known as the "time of last scattering" or the period of recombination or decoupling. [55]
Since decoupling, the color temperature of the background radiation has dropped by an average factor of 1,089 [56] due to the expansion of the universe. As the universe expands, the CMB photons are redshifted, causing them to decrease in energy. The color temperature of this radiation stays inversely proportional to a parameter that describes the relative expansion of the universe over time, known as the scale length. The color temperature Tr of the CMB as a function of redshift, z, can be shown to be proportional to the color temperature of the CMB as observed in the present day (2.725 K or 0.2348 meV): [57]
The anisotropy, or directional dependency, of the cosmic microwave background is divided into two types: primary anisotropy, due to effects that occur at the surface of last scattering and before; and secondary anisotropy, due to effects such as interactions of the background radiation with intervening hot gas or gravitational potentials, which occur between the last scattering surface and the observer.
The structure of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is principally determined by two effects: acoustic oscillations and diffusion damping (also called collisionless damping or Silk damping). The acoustic oscillations arise because of a conflict in the photon–baryon plasma in the early universe. The pressure of the photons tends to erase anisotropies, whereas the gravitational attraction of the baryons, moving at speeds much slower than light, makes them tend to collapse to form overdensities. These two effects compete to create acoustic oscillations, which give the microwave background its characteristic peak structure. The peaks correspond, roughly, to resonances in which the photons decouple when a particular mode is at its peak amplitude.
The peaks contain interesting physical signatures. The angular scale of the first peak determines the curvature of the universe (but not the topology of the universe). The next peak—ratio of the odd peaks to the even peaks—determines the reduced baryon density. [58] The third peak can be used to get information about the dark-matter density. [59]
The locations of the peaks give important information about the nature of the primordial density perturbations. There are two fundamental types of density perturbations called adiabatic and isocurvature. A general density perturbation is a mixture of both, and different theories that purport to explain the primordial density perturbation spectrum predict different mixtures.
The CMB spectrum can distinguish between these two because these two types of perturbations produce different peak locations. Isocurvature density perturbations produce a series of peaks whose angular scales (ℓ values of the peaks) are roughly in the ratio 1 : 3 : 5 : ..., while adiabatic density perturbations produce peaks whose locations are in the ratio 1 : 2 : 3 : ... [60] Observations are consistent with the primordial density perturbations being entirely adiabatic, providing key support for inflation, and ruling out many models of structure formation involving, for example, cosmic strings.
Collisionless damping is caused by two effects, when the treatment of the primordial plasma as fluid begins to break down:
These effects contribute about equally to the suppression of anisotropies at small scales and give rise to the characteristic exponential damping tail seen in the very small angular scale anisotropies.
The depth of the LSS refers to the fact that the decoupling of the photons and baryons does not happen instantaneously, but instead requires an appreciable fraction of the age of the universe up to that era. One method of quantifying how long this process took uses the photon visibility function (PVF). This function is defined so that, denoting the PVF by P(t), the probability that a CMB photon last scattered between time t and t + dt is given by P(t) dt.
The maximum of the PVF (the time when it is most likely that a given CMB photon last scattered) is known quite precisely. The first-year WMAP results put the time at which P(t) has a maximum as 372,000 years. [61] This is often taken as the "time" at which the CMB formed. However, to figure out how long it took the photons and baryons to decouple, we need a measure of the width of the PVF. The WMAP team finds that the PVF is greater than half of its maximal value (the "full width at half maximum", or FWHM) over an interval of 115,000 years. By this measure, decoupling took place over roughly 115,000 years, and when it was complete, the universe was roughly 487,000 years old.[ citation needed ]
Since the CMB came into existence, it has apparently been modified by several subsequent physical processes, which are collectively referred to as late-time anisotropy, or secondary anisotropy. When the CMB photons became free to travel unimpeded, ordinary matter in the universe was mostly in the form of neutral hydrogen and helium atoms. However, observations of galaxies today seem to indicate that most of the volume of the intergalactic medium (IGM) consists of ionized material (since there are few absorption lines due to hydrogen atoms). This implies a period of reionization during which some of the material of the universe was broken into hydrogen ions.
The CMB photons are scattered by free charges such as electrons that are not bound in atoms. In an ionized universe, such charged particles have been liberated from neutral atoms by ionizing (ultraviolet) radiation. Today these free charges are at sufficiently low density in most of the volume of the universe that they do not measurably affect the CMB. However, if the IGM was ionized at very early times when the universe was still denser, then there are two main effects on the CMB:
Both of these effects have been observed by the WMAP spacecraft, providing evidence that the universe was ionized at very early times, at a redshift more than 17.[ clarification needed ] The detailed provenance of this early ionizing radiation is still a matter of scientific debate. It may have included starlight from the very first population of stars (population III stars), supernovae when these first stars reached the end of their lives, or the ionizing radiation produced by the accretion disks of massive black holes.
The time following the emission of the cosmic microwave background—and before the observation of the first stars—is semi-humorously referred to by cosmologists as the Dark Age, and is a period which is under intense study by astronomers (see 21 centimeter radiation).
Two other effects which occurred between reionization and our observations of the cosmic microwave background, and which appear to cause anisotropies, are the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect, where a cloud of high-energy electrons scatters the radiation, transferring some of its energy to the CMB photons, and the Sachs–Wolfe effect, which causes photons from the Cosmic Microwave Background to be gravitationally redshifted or blueshifted due to changing gravitational fields.
The cosmic microwave background is polarized at the level of a few microkelvin. There are two types of polarization, called E-modes and B-modes. This is in analogy to electrostatics, in which the electric field (E-field) has a vanishing curl and the magnetic field (B-field) has a vanishing divergence.
The E-modes arise from Thomson scattering in a heterogeneous plasma. [62] E-modes were first seen in 2002 by the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI).[ citation needed ]
B-modes are expected to be an order of magnitude weaker than the E-modes. They not produced by standard scalar type perturbations, but are generated gravitational wave during cosmic inflation shortly after the big bang. [63] [64] [65] However, gravitational lensing of the stronger E-modes can also produce B-mode polarization. [66] [67] Detecting the original B-modes signal requires analysis of the contamination caused by lensing of the relatively strong E-mode signal. [68]
Primordial gravitational waves are gravitational waves that could be observed in the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background and having their origin in the early universe. [69] [70] Models of cosmic inflation predict that such gravitational waves should appear; thus, their detection would support the theory of inflation, and their strength can confirm and exclude different models of inflation. It is the result of three things: inflationary expansion, reheating after inflation, and turbulent fluid mixing of matter and radiation.[ citation needed ]
On 17 March 2014, it was announced [71] that the BICEP2 instrument had detected the first type of B-modes, consistent with inflation and gravitational waves in the early universe at the level of r = 0.20+0.07
−0.05, which is the amount of power present in gravitational waves compared to the amount of power present in other scalar density perturbations in the very early universe. Had this been confirmed it would have provided strong evidence for cosmic inflation and the Big Bang [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] and against the ekpyrotic model of Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok. [79] However, on 19 June 2014, considerably lowered confidence in confirming the findings was reported [77] [80] [81] and on 19 September 2014, new results of the Planck experiment reported that the results of BICEP2 can be fully attributed to cosmic dust. [82] [83]
The second type of B-modes was discovered in 2013 using the South Pole Telescope with help from the Herschel Space Observatory. [84] In October 2014, a measurement of the B-mode polarization at 150 GHz was published by the POLARBEAR experiment. [85] Compared to BICEP2, POLARBEAR focuses on a smaller patch of the sky and is less susceptible to dust effects. The team reported that POLARBEAR's measured B-mode polarization was of cosmological origin (and not just due to dust) at a 97.2% confidence level. [86]
Subsequent to the discovery of the CMB, hundreds of cosmic microwave background experiments have been conducted to measure and characterize the signatures of the radiation. The most famous experiment is probably the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite that orbited in 1989–1996 and which detected and quantified the large scale anisotropies at the limit of its detection capabilities. Inspired by the initial COBE results of an extremely isotropic and homogeneous background, a series of ground- and balloon-based experiments quantified CMB anisotropies on smaller angular scales over the next decade. The primary goal of these experiments was to measure the angular scale of the first acoustic peak, for which COBE did not have sufficient resolution. These measurements were able to rule out cosmic strings as the leading theory of cosmic structure formation, and suggested cosmic inflation was the right theory.
During the 1990s, the first peak was measured with increasing sensitivity and by 2000 the BOOMERanG experiment reported that the highest power fluctuations occur at scales of approximately one degree. Together with other cosmological data, these results implied that the geometry of the universe is flat. A number of ground-based interferometers provided measurements of the fluctuations with higher accuracy over the next three years, including the Very Small Array, Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), and the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI). DASI made the first detection of the polarization of the CMB and the CBI provided the first E-mode polarization spectrum with compelling evidence that it is out of phase with the T-mode spectrum.
In June 2001, NASA launched a second CMB space mission, WMAP, to make much more precise measurements of the large scale anisotropies over the full sky. WMAP used symmetric, rapid-multi-modulated scanning, rapid switching radiometers to minimize non-sky signal noise. [56] The first results from this mission, disclosed in 2003, were detailed measurements of the angular power spectrum at a scale of less than one degree, tightly constraining various cosmological parameters. The results are broadly consistent with those expected from cosmic inflation as well as various other competing theories, and are available in detail at NASA's data bank for Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) (see links below). Although WMAP provided very accurate measurements of the large scale angular fluctuations in the CMB (structures about as broad in the sky as the moon), it did not have the angular resolution to measure the smaller scale fluctuations which had been observed by former ground-based interferometers.
A third space mission, the ESA (European Space Agency) Planck Surveyor, was launched in May 2009 and performed an even more detailed investigation until it was shut down in October 2013. Planck employed both HEMT radiometers and bolometer technology and measured the CMB at a smaller scale than WMAP. Its detectors were trialled in the Antarctic Viper telescope as ACBAR (Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver) experiment—which has produced the most precise measurements at small angular scales to date—and in the Archeops balloon telescope.
On 21 March 2013, the European-led research team behind the Planck cosmology probe released the mission's all-sky map (565x318 jpeg, 3600x1800 jpeg) of the cosmic microwave background. [87] [88] The map suggests the universe is slightly older than researchers expected. According to the map, subtle fluctuations in temperature were imprinted on the deep sky when the cosmos was about 370000 years old. The imprint reflects ripples that arose as early, in the existence of the universe, as the first nonillionth of a second. Apparently, these ripples gave rise to the present vast cosmic web of galaxy clusters and dark matter. Based on the 2013 data, the universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. On 5 February 2015, new data was released by the Planck mission, according to which the age of the universe is 13.799±0.021 billion years old and the Hubble constant was measured to be 67.74±0.46 (km/s)/Mpc. [89]
Additional ground-based instruments such as the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica and the proposed Clover Project, Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the QUIET telescope in Chile will provide additional data not available from satellite observations, possibly including the B-mode polarization.
This section may be too technical for most readers to understand.(February 2023) |
Raw CMBR data, even from space vehicles such as WMAP or Planck, contain foreground effects that completely obscure the fine-scale structure of the cosmic microwave background. The fine-scale structure is superimposed on the raw CMBR data but is too small to be seen at the scale of the raw data. The most prominent of the foreground effects is the dipole anisotropy caused by the Sun's motion relative to the CMBR background. The dipole anisotropy and others due to Earth's annual motion relative to the Sun and numerous microwave sources in the galactic plane and elsewhere must be subtracted out to reveal the extremely tiny variations characterizing the fine-scale structure of the CMBR background.
The detailed analysis of CMBR data to produce maps, an angular power spectrum, and ultimately cosmological parameters is a complicated, computationally difficult problem. Although computing a power spectrum from a map is in principle a simple Fourier transform, decomposing the map of the sky into spherical harmonics, [90]
where the term measures the mean temperature and term accounts for the fluctuation, where the refers to a spherical harmonic, and ℓ is the multipole number while m is the azimuthal number.
By applying the angular correlation function, the sum can be reduced to an expression that only involves ℓ and power spectrum term The angled brackets indicate the average with respect to all observers in the universe; since the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, therefore there is an absence of preferred observing direction. Thus, C is independent of m. Different choices of ℓ correspond to multipole moments of CMB.
In practice it is hard to take the effects of noise and foreground sources into account. In particular, these foregrounds are dominated by galactic emissions such as Bremsstrahlung, synchrotron, and dust that emit in the microwave band; in practice, the galaxy has to be removed, resulting in a CMB map that is not a full-sky map. In addition, point sources like galaxies and clusters represent another source of foreground which must be removed so as not to distort the short scale structure of the CMB power spectrum.
Constraints on many cosmological parameters can be obtained from their effects on the power spectrum, and results are often calculated using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques.
When ℓ = 0, the term reduced to 1, and what we have left here is just the mean temperature of the CMB. This "mean" is called CMB monopole, and it is observed to have an average temperature of about Tγ = 2.7255±0.0006 K [90] with one standard deviation confidence. The accuracy of this mean temperature may be impaired by the diverse measurements done by different mapping measurements. Such measurements demand absolute temperature devices, such as the FIRAS instrument on the COBE satellite. The measured kTγ is equivalent to 0.234 meV or 4.6×10−10 mec2. The photon number density of a blackbody having such temperature is . Its energy density is , and the ratio to the critical density is Ωγ = 5.38 × 10−5. [90]
CMB dipole represents the largest anisotropy, which is in the first spherical harmonic (ℓ = 1). When ℓ = 1, the term reduces to one cosine function and thus encodes amplitude fluctuation. The amplitude of CMB dipole is around 3.3621±0.0010 mK. [90] Since the universe is presumed to be homogeneous and isotropic, an observer should see the blackbody spectrum with temperature T at every point in the sky. The spectrum of the dipole has been confirmed to be the differential of a blackbody spectrum.
CMB dipole is frame-dependent. The CMB dipole moment could also be interpreted as the peculiar motion of the Earth toward the CMB. Its amplitude depends on the time due to the Earth's orbit about the barycenter of the solar system. This enables us to add a time-dependent term to the dipole expression. The modulation of this term is 1 year, [90] [91] which fits the observation done by COBE FIRAS. [91] [92] The dipole moment does not encode any primordial information.
From the CMB data, it is seen that the Sun appears to be moving at 368±2 km/s relative to the reference frame of the CMB (also called the CMB rest frame, or the frame of reference in which there is no motion through the CMB). The Local Group — the galaxy group that includes our own Milky Way galaxy — appears to be moving at 627±22 km/s in the direction of galactic longitude ℓ = 276°±3°, b = 30°±3°. [90] [13] This motion results in an anisotropy of the data (CMB appearing slightly warmer in the direction of movement than in the opposite direction). [90] The standard interpretation of this temperature variation is a simple velocity redshift and blueshift due to motion relative to the CMB, but alternative cosmological models can explain some fraction of the observed dipole temperature distribution in the CMB.
A 2021 study of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer questions the kinematic interpretation of CMB anisotropy with high statistical confidence. [93]
The temperature variation in the CMB temperature maps at higher multipoles, or ℓ ≥ 2, is considered to be the result of perturbations of the density in the early Universe, before the recombination epoch. Before recombination, the Universe consisted of a hot, dense plasma of electrons and baryons. In such a hot dense environment, electrons and protons could not form any neutral atoms. The baryons in such early Universe remained highly ionized and so were tightly coupled with photons through the effect of Thompson scattering. These phenomena caused the pressure and gravitational effects to act against each other, and triggered fluctuations in the photon-baryon plasma. Quickly after the recombination epoch, the rapid expansion of the universe caused the plasma to cool down and these fluctuations are "frozen into" the CMB maps we observe today. The said procedure happened at a redshift of around z ⋍ 1100. [90]
With the increasingly precise data provided by WMAP, there have been a number of claims that the CMB exhibits anomalies, such as very large scale anisotropies, anomalous alignments, and non-Gaussian distributions. [94] [95] [96] The most longstanding of these is the low-ℓ multipole controversy. Even in the COBE map, it was observed that the quadrupole (ℓ = 2, spherical harmonic) has a low amplitude compared to the predictions of the Big Bang. In particular, the quadrupole and octupole (ℓ = 3) modes appear to have an unexplained alignment with each other and with both the ecliptic plane and equinoxes. [97] [98] [99] A number of groups have suggested that this could be the signature of new physics at the greatest observable scales; other groups suspect systematic errors in the data. [100] [101] [102]
Ultimately, due to the foregrounds and the cosmic variance problem, the greatest modes will never be as well measured as the small angular scale modes. The analyses were performed on two maps that have had the foregrounds removed as far as possible: the "internal linear combination" map of the WMAP collaboration and a similar map prepared by Max Tegmark and others. [49] [56] [103] Later analyses have pointed out that these are the modes most susceptible to foreground contamination from synchrotron, dust, and Bremsstrahlung emission, and from experimental uncertainty in the monopole and dipole.
A full Bayesian analysis of the WMAP power spectrum demonstrates that the quadrupole prediction of Lambda-CDM cosmology is consistent with the data at the 10% level and that the observed octupole is not remarkable. [104] Carefully accounting for the procedure used to remove the foregrounds from the full sky map further reduces the significance of the alignment by ~5%. [105] [106] [107] [108] Recent observations with the Planck telescope, which is very much more sensitive than WMAP and has a larger angular resolution, record the same anomaly, and so instrumental error (but not foreground contamination) appears to be ruled out. [109] Coincidence is a possible explanation, chief scientist from WMAP, Charles L. Bennett suggested coincidence and human psychology were involved, "I do think there is a bit of a psychological effect; people want to find unusual things." [110]
Assuming the universe keeps expanding and it does not suffer a Big Crunch, a Big Rip, or another similar fate, the cosmic microwave background will continue redshifting until it will no longer be detectable, [111] and will be superseded first by the one produced by starlight, and perhaps, later by the background radiation fields of processes that may take place in the far future of the universe such as proton decay, evaporation of black holes, and positronium decay. [112]
Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate. Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood.
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), originally known as the Microwave Anisotropy Probe, was a NASA spacecraft operating from 2001 to 2010 which measured temperature differences across the sky in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the radiant heat remaining from the Big Bang. Headed by Professor Charles L. Bennett of Johns Hopkins University, the mission was developed in a joint partnership between the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Princeton University. The WMAP spacecraft was launched on 30 June 2001 from Florida. The WMAP mission succeeded the COBE space mission and was the second medium-class (MIDEX) spacecraft in the NASA Explorer program. In 2003, MAP was renamed WMAP in honor of cosmologist David Todd Wilkinson (1935–2002), who had been a member of the mission's science team. After nine years of operations, WMAP was switched off in 2010, following the launch of the more advanced Planck spacecraft by European Space Agency (ESA) in 2009.
The Cosmic Background Explorer, also referred to as Explorer 66, was a NASA satellite dedicated to cosmology, which operated from 1989 to 1993. Its goals were to investigate the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe and provide measurements that would help shape our understanding of the cosmos.
The Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect is the spectral distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) through inverse Compton scattering by high-energy electrons in galaxy clusters, in which the low-energy CMB photons receive an average energy boost during collision with the high-energy cluster electrons. Observed distortions of the cosmic microwave background spectrum are used to detect the disturbance of density in the universe. Using the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect, dense clusters of galaxies have been observed.
The Sachs–Wolfe effect, named after Rainer K. Sachs and Arthur M. Wolfe, is a property of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), in which photons from the CMB are gravitationally redshifted, causing the CMB spectrum to appear uneven. This effect is the predominant source of fluctuations in the CMB for angular scales larger than about ten degrees.
Observational cosmology is the study of the structure, the evolution and the origin of the universe through observation, using instruments such as telescopes and cosmic ray detectors.
In physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang. Astronomers have derived two different measurements of the age of the universe: a measurement based on direct observations of an early state of the universe, which indicate an age of 13.787±0.020 billion years as interpreted with the Lambda-CDM concordance model as of 2021; and a measurement based on the observations of the local, modern universe, which suggest a younger age. The uncertainty of the first kind of measurement has been narrowed down to 20 million years, based on a number of studies that all show similar figures for the age. These studies include researches of the microwave background radiation by the Planck spacecraft, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other space probes. Measurements of the cosmic background radiation give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang, and measurements of the expansion rate of the universe can be used to calculate its approximate age by extrapolating backwards in time. The range of the estimate is also within the range of the estimate for the oldest observed star in the universe.
Primordial fluctuations are density variations in the early universe which are considered the seeds of all structure in the universe. Currently, the most widely accepted explanation for their origin is in the context of cosmic inflation. According to the inflationary paradigm, the exponential growth of the scale factor during inflation caused quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field to be stretched to macroscopic scales, and, upon leaving the horizon, to "freeze in". At the later stages of radiation- and matter-domination, these fluctuations re-entered the horizon, and thus set the initial conditions for structure formation.
Planck was a space observatory operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) from 2009 to 2013. It was an ambitious project that aimed to map the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at microwave and infrared frequencies, with high sensitivity and small angular resolution. The mission was highly successful and substantially improved upon observations made by the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
The cosmic neutrino background is the universe's background particle radiation composed of neutrinos. They are sometimes known as relic neutrinos.
The Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI) was a telescope installed at the U.S. National Science Foundation's Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. It was a 13-element interferometer operating between 26 and 36 GHz in ten bands. The instrument is similar in design to the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) and the Very Small Array (VSA). In 2001 The DASI team announced the most detailed measurements of the temperature, or power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These results contained the first detection of the 2nd and 3rd acoustic peaks in the CMB, which were important evidence for inflation theory. This announcement was done in conjunction with the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA experiment. In 2002 the team reported the first detection of polarization anisotropies in the CMB.
Archeops was a balloon-borne instrument dedicated to measuring the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The study of this radiation is essential to obtain precise information on the evolution of the Universe: density, Hubble constant, age of the Universe, etc. To achieve this goal, measurements were done with devices cooled down at 100mK temperature placed at the focus of a warm telescope. To avoid atmospheric disturbance the whole apparatus is placed on a gondola below a helium balloon that reaches 40 km altitude.
The CMB Cold Spot or WMAP Cold Spot is a region of the sky seen in microwaves that has been found to be unusually large and cold relative to the expected properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). The "Cold Spot" is approximately 70 μK (0.00007 K) colder than the average CMB temperature, whereas the root mean square of typical temperature variations is only 18 μK. At some points, the "cold spot" is 140 μK colder than the average CMB temperature.
In modern cosmological theory, diffusion damping, also called photon diffusion damping, is a physical process which reduced density inequalities (anisotropies) in the early universe, making the universe itself and the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) more uniform. Around 300,000 years after the Big Bang, during the epoch of recombination, diffusing photons travelled from hot regions of space to cold ones, equalising the temperatures of these regions. This effect is responsible, along with baryon acoustic oscillations, the Doppler effect, and the effects of gravity on electromagnetic radiation, for the eventual formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters, these being the dominant large scale structures which are observed in the universe. It is a damping by diffusion, not of diffusion.
In cosmology, the steady-state model or steady state theory is an alternative to the Big Bang theory. In the steady-state model, the density of matter in the expanding universe remains unchanged due to a continuous creation of matter, thus adhering to the perfect cosmological principle, a principle that says that the observable universe is always the same at any time and any place.
The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is an array of microwave telescopes at a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert of Chile as part of the Parque Astronómico de Atacama. The CLASS experiment aims to improve our understanding of cosmic dawn when the first stars turned on, test the theory of cosmic inflation, and distinguish between inflationary models of the very early universe by making precise measurements of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over 65% of the sky at multiple frequencies in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The "axis of evil" is a name given to the apparent correlation between the plane of the Solar System and aspects of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It gives the plane of the Solar System and hence the location of Earth a greater significance than might be expected by chance – a result which has been claimed to be evidence of a departure from the Copernican principle as assumed in the concordance model.
In cosmological inflation, within the slow-roll paradigm, the Lyth argument places a theoretical upper bound on the amount of gravitational waves produced during inflation, given the amount of departure from the homogeneity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
CMB spectral distortions are tiny departures of the average cosmic microwave background (CMB) frequency spectrum from the predictions given by a perfect black body. They can be produced by a number of standard and non-standard processes occurring at the early stages of cosmic history, and therefore allow us to probe the standard picture of cosmology. Importantly, the CMB frequency spectrum and its distortions should not be confused with the CMB anisotropy power spectrum, which relates to spatial fluctuations of the CMB temperature in different directions of the sky.
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