There is an odd streak in the universe – and we still don’t know why

An anomaly in the temperature of the universe has long -puzzled physicists, and a new analysis of data from several radioteleeses only deepened the riddle of what it causes.

This strange strip is visible in The echoing of the big explosion – The radiation that has been moving towards us since the beginning of time is called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Physicists agree that our view of the universe or position in it should not be exceptional, so they expect CMB to look approximately the same in all directions. But measurements are shown differently: there is an axis along which CMB passes from cold to hot. This is called dipole, and Lucas Boy The University of Bilefeld in Germany and its employees now showed how strange this is, referring to the radio communications.

Böhme says that the existence of a dipole in CMB in itself is not surprising, but its size does not correspond to our strongest models of cosmology. Radiation emitted from a moving source or measured by someone, who moves – and the Earth, our solar system and our entire galaxy all move – will move to be warmer or colder, depending on this movement from the effect of the Doppler and other relative effects of movement that follows from Theory of special relativityThe field but the dipole, which the researchers have observed for decades, corresponds to the movement about ten times faster than expected.

To get the best idea of ​​this discrepancy, Boy and his colleagues analyzed data from six telescopes that collect radio waves. After a thorough analysis, they narrowed the data to three, which they found most accurate and analyzed it in accordance with the new model, where Radio waves Come from the sky. Boy says that their approach was like dividing the sky into pixels and carefully determining how many radiation sources are contained in each. Nevertheless, even with this painstaking adjustment, the dipole secret remained.

Brown Dragan At the University of Michigan, it says that new discoveries are interesting precisely because of how careful the analysis of the team was. According to him, this is a rather significant step towards creating a dipole as an indisputable fact about CMB, which will be of great importance. This is because it would mean that we either do not understand anything about the structure of our region in space, or the whole universe is not like our The most successful theories assume that it should be. Nevertheless, Huterer says that the measurements of radiostronomy, as you know, are difficult to make accurate, so there can still be systematic errors in the data.

According to Bem, part of the call proceeds from the fact that all the radio signals that telescopes collect are weak. “This is a really small thing that we want to measure. It's really difficult to calibrate [radio] A survey to be so accurate, ”he says. But this is not the only proof that we have a dipole. Infrared radiation emanating from the quasars seems to reinforce the measurements of radio waves, but in fact it will depend on future telescopes to add greater accuracy and reduce the secret of the dipole, says Bem.

Link: Physical review lettersIN The upcoming