A NEW examination of what is essentially the universe’s birth certificate allows astronomers to tweak the age, girth and speed of the cosmos, more secure in their knowledge of how it evolved, what it’s made of and its ultimate fate.

Sure, the universe suddenly seems to be showing its age, now calculated at 13.8 billion years – 80 million years older than scientists had thought. It’s got about 3 per cent more girth – technically it’s more matter than mysterious dark energy – and it is expanding about 3 per cent more slowly.

READ THE LATEST STORY: Cosmic cold spots hint at other universes

But with all that comes the wisdom for humanity. Scientists have a good understanding of the Big Bang and what happened just afterward, and may actually understand a bit more about the cosmic question of how we are where we are.
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All this has come from a baby picture of fossilized light and sound.

The snapshot from a European satellite had scientists from Paris to Washington celebrating a cosmic victory of knowledge last week – basic precepts that go back all the way to Einstein and relativity.

The Planck space telescope mapped background radiation from the early universe – now calculated at about 13.8 billion years old. The results bolstered a key theory called ``inflation,’‘ which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its vast expanse in a fraction of a second just after the Big Bang that created the cosmos.

``We’ve uncovered a fundamental truth of the universe,’‘ said George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge who announced the Planck findings in Paris. ``There’s less stuff that we don’t understand by a tiny amount.’‘

The map of the universe’s evolution – in sound echoes and fossilized light going back billions of years – reinforces some predictions made decades ago solely on the basis of mathematical concepts.

``We understand the very early universe potentially better than we understand the bottom of our oceans,’‘ said Bob Nichols, director of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in Britain. ``We as humanity put a satellite into space, we predicted what it should see and saw it.’‘

Independent scientists said the results were comparable on a universal scale to the announcement earlier this month by a different European physics group on a subatomic level – with the finding of the Higgs boson particle that explains mass in the universe.

``What a wonderful triumph of the mathematical approach to describing nature. The precision is breathtaking,’‘ said Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicis. ``The satellite is measuring temperature variations in space – which arose from processes that took place almost 14 billion years ago – to one part in 1 million. Amazing.’‘

The Big Bang theory says the universe was smaller than an atom in the beginning when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded faster than the speed of light – an idea that scientists call inflation. It’s based in part on Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity – from about 90 years ago.

``The universe is described amazingly well by a simple model,’‘ said Charles Lawrence, the lead Planck scientist for NASA, which took part in the research. ``What is new is how well the model fits both the old data and the new data from Planck.’‘

The $900 million Planck space telescope, launched in 2009, is named for the German physicist Max Planck, the originator of quantum physics. It has spent 15 months mapping the sky, examining so-called light fossils and sound echoes from the Big Bang by looking at background radiation. When the light first burst out, it was blinding, but it is now fractions of a degree above absolute zero, Lawrence said.

The space telescope is expected to keep transmitting data until late this year, when it runs out of cooling fluid.

Planck’s examination of the Big Bang’s afterglow set the universe’s age at about 13.8 billion years. Scientists often round up to 14 billion years anyway, and Caltech’s Carroll said an additional 100 million years is nothing – like adding a month to the age of a 13-year-old.

But 100 million years is important, countered Planck scientist Martin White: ``100 million years here and there really start to add up.’‘

The new results also mean there’s slightly less dark energy in the universe than scientists figured. Instead of 71.4 per cent of the universe being that mysterious force, it’s 68.3 per cent. This dark energy is smoothly spread throughout the universe and gives the ``push’‘ to its expansion, Carroll said.

The results also slightly boosted the amount of dark matter in the universe – up to 26.8 percent – and more normal matter, up to 4.9 percent. The concept known as the Hubble constant, which measures how fast the universe is expanding, was adjusted to be about 3 percent slower than scientists had thought.

But the bigger picture was how Planck fit the inflation theory, which physicists came up with more than 30 years ago.

Inflation tries to explain some nagging problems left over from the Big Bang. Other space probes have shown that the geometry of the universe is predominantly flat, but the Big Bang said it should curve with time.

Another problem was that opposite ends of space are so far apart that they could never have been near each other under the normal laws of physics, but early cosmic microwave background measurements show they must have been in contact.

Inflation says the universe swelled tremendously, going ``from subatomic size to something as large as the observable universe in a fraction of a second,’‘ Greene said.

Planck shows that inflation is proving to be the best explanation for what happened just after the Big Bang, but that doesn’t mean it is the right theory or that it even comes close to resolving all the outstanding problems in the theory, Efstathiou said.

There was an odd spike in some of the Planck temperature data that hinted at a preferred direction or axis that seemed to fit nicely with the angle of our solar system, which shouldn’t be, he said.

But overall, Planck’s results touched on mysteries of the universe that have already garnered scientists three different Nobel prizes. Scientists studying cosmic background radiation won Nobels in 1978 and 2006, and other work on dark energy won the Nobel in 2011.

At the news conference, Efstathiou said the pioneers of inflation theory should start thinking about their own Nobel prizes. Two of those theorists – Paul Steinhardt of Princeton and Andreas Albrecht of University of California Davis – said before the announcement that they were sort of hoping that their inflation theory would not be bolstered.

That’s because taking inflation a step further leads to a sticky situation: An infinite number of universes.

To make inflation work, that split-second of expansion may not stop elsewhere like it does in the observable universe, Albrecht and Steinhardt said. That means there are places where expansion is zooming fast, with an infinite number of universes that stretch to infinity, they said.

Steinhardt dismissed any talk of a Nobel.

``This is about how humans figure out how the universe works and where it’s going,’‘ Steinhardt said.

Efstathiou said the Planck results ultimately could spin off entirely new fields of physics – and some unresolvable oddities in explaining the cosmos.

``You can get very, very strange answers to problems when you start thinking about what different observers might see in different universes,’‘ he said.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/scientists-revise-big-bang-theory-there-may-be-multiple-universes/story-e6frgcjx-1226603461335

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macx

SCIENTISTS believe they have found the first evidence that other universes exist.

The finding, based on data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft, implies that our universe could be just one of billions – perhaps an infinite number.

Such theories have been discussed by cosmologists for decades – but until now they have lacked any evidence.

A few weeks ago, however, scientists published a spectacular new map of the cosmic microwave background – the “radiation” left behind after the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8bn years ago.

The map, based on Planck data, showed anomalies in the background radiation that, some cosmologists say, could only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes outside our own.

“These anomalies were caused by other universes pulling on our universe as it formed during the Big Bang,” said Laura Mersini-Houghton, a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“They are the first hard evidence for the existence of other universes that we have seen.”

Such ideas are controversial but are attracting growing interest among physicists. This is because Mersini-Houghton, and her colleague Professor Richard Holman, at Carnegie Mellon University, published a series of papers from 2005 predicting what Planck would see.

In particular, they predicted that the ancient radiation permeating our universe would show anomalies generated by the pull from other universes.

The scientists analysing the Planck data have now published a paper acknowledging the anomalies exist and cannot be explained by conventional means. “It may be that the statistical anomalies described in this paper are a hint of more profound physical phenomena that are yet to be revealed,” it said.

Planck worked by gathering radiation from when the universe was just 370,000 years old – still glowing from the Big Bang. It has been travelling across space for 13.8bn years and so is remarkably faint but still detectable. In theory, that radiation should vary a little on the scale of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, but at much larger scales it should be evenly distributed.

In practice, however, Planck’s data shows this is not the case. The radiation is stronger in one half of the sky than the other. There is also a large “cold” spot where the temperature is below average.

Mersini-Houghton will set out her findings in Britain, first at the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye, starting this week, and then at a cosmology conference in Oxford.

They are likely to provoke a powerful reaction from other academics, some of whom have spent decades working on alternative theories that will be scrapped if Mersini-Houghton and Holman are proven right.

Malcolm Perry, professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge, said the idea needed work but was “very exciting”. “It is exactly right to say that this could be the first evidence for other universes.”

George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge, who co-authored the papers setting out the Planck findings, said the suggestion that the data offered evidence for other universes was speculative but “very interesting”.

He added: “Such ideas may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago. But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe.”

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:)

macx

Not sure I like multiple universes. If true, will they all act similarly, ie born and die then nothing else?

I find it very depressing that the universe/or universes will one day run down then after that an infinity of time and cold dead space.

Skunkworks said:

Not sure I like multiple universes. If true, will they all act similarly, ie born and die then nothing else?

I find it very depressing that the universe/or universes will one day run down then after that an infinity of time and cold dead space.

its unlikely

someone else might have already worked out a way to stop this happening

just not here, not now

personally I think the universe is much older than we might even suspect

Such ideas are controversial but are attracting growing interest among physicists. This is because Mersini-Houghton, and her colleague Professor Richard Holman, at Carnegie Mellon University, published a series of papers from 2005 predicting what Planck would see.

In particular, they predicted that the ancient radiation permeating our universe would show anomalies generated by the pull from other universes.

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Does this mean that dark energy is explained somewhat by gravitating to other universes?

macx said:

There is also a large “cold” spot where the temperature is below average.

It was only yesterday that I was reading about the cold spot in the CMBR in Wikipedia.

macx said:

The radiation is stronger in one half of the sky than the other.

Don’t they correct for earth’s motion relative to the CMBR? Or by “stronger”, do they mean more intense but not hotter?

Skunkworks said:

Not sure I like multiple universes. If true, will they all act similarly, ie born and die then nothing else?

I find it very depressing that the universe/or universes will one day run down then after that an infinity of time and cold dead space.

this universe happened

so why can’t another one happen?

CrazyNeutrino said:

Skunkworks said:

Not sure I like multiple universes. If true, will they all act similarly, ie born and die then nothing else?

I find it very depressing that the universe/or universes will one day run down then after that an infinity of time and cold dead space.

this universe happened

so why can’t another one happen?

I don’t know. If they pop along like buses that might be fine, But in my mind if all I see is destined to grind down and not just for a period but for ever because energy is spent and distributed then I find that sad.

Of course this universe or another, multiple or not, etc Reality will intrude, it may be that the universe and everything will wind down. That might be the reality and I think it sad. A dead universe and dead forever.

Coincidentally I read almost the same thing this morning.

In Brian Greene’s book, The Hidden Reality (which I think is better in many ways than the Lawrence Krauss book).

The Wikipedia article I referred to above also mentions a parallel universe as a possible explanation of the Cold Spot. However, many cold spots in the CMBR are known to be caused by the Sachs-Wolfe effect. A particular form of this effect, the late-time integrated Sachs–Wolfe effect, is caused by voids in the line-of-sight between the observer and the cosmic background. Light from the cosmic background passing through the void is gravitationally cooled (redshifted) but the expansion of the universe during this time prevents a complete reversal of the cooling. This has be investigated as the cause of the Cold Spot but the evidence is lacking but not entirely ruled out.

But 100 million years is important, countered Planck scientist Martin White

and he calls himself an astronomer???

Inflation says the universe swelled tremendously, going ``from subatomic size to something as large as the observable universe in a fraction of a second,’’ Greene said

I hate it when people say things like this (with the caveat that the truncated quote means that we can’t be exactly sure what he said)

I would prefer it if people said that “a part of the universe that was the size of an atom/proton/whatever swelled to the size of the observable universe today” or talked about the number of times the universe doubled in size (or “expanded a million trillion trillion times”).

MartinB said:

bq. Inflation says the universe swelled tremendously, going ``from subatomic size to something as large as the observable universe in a fraction of a second,’’ Greene said

I hate it when people say things like this (with the caveat that the truncated quote means that we can’t be exactly sure what he said)

I would prefer it if people said that “a part of the universe that was the size of an atom/proton/whatever swelled to the size of the observable universe today” or talked about the number of times the universe doubled in size (or “expanded a million trillion trillion times”).

To be fair to Greene, he is more careful with the wording in the book.

And he even uses equations (albeit restricted to the notes).

But I remain unconvinced that we have any observational evidence that the observable universe was ever of sub-atomic size.

But I remain unconvinced that we have any observational evidence that the observable universe was ever of sub-atomic size.

I’m not going to argue (because I have no time ;-) but I will note in passing that we are at a point of scientific complexity where I’m not sure that the term “observational evidence” is much help. All observations at this point are interpretable only through theoretetical frameworks which in turn embed much observational evidence…

MartinB said:

bq. But I remain unconvinced that we have any observational evidence that the observable universe was ever of sub-atomic size.

I’m not going to argue (because I have no time ;-) but I will note in passing that we are at a point of scientific complexity where I’m not sure that the term “observational evidence” is much help. All observations at this point are interpretable only through theoretetical frameworks which in turn embed much observational evidence…

I’d say that observations have always only been interpretable through theoretical frameworks which in turn embed much observational evidence, but in the past when theoretical frameworks have been extrapolated past the point where there is any observational evidence, sooner or later they have always been found to require revision when more observational evidence became available.

I just don’t see why it should be any different now.

I just don’t see why it should be any different now.

It’s not different and hence your earlier comment provides no novel insight with respect to the character of the evidence but merely expresses an opinion of yours that may or may not be well founded.

MartinB said:

bq. I just don’t see why it should be any different now.

It’s not different and hence your earlier comment provides no novel insight with respect to the character of the evidence but merely expresses an opinion of yours that may or may not be well founded.

Probably be a bit presumptuous to claim novelty value for anything that appears here :)

The Rev Dodgson said:

MartinB said:

But I remain unconvinced that we have any observational evidence that the observable universe was ever of sub-atomic size.

I would say that BB is a singularity of superposition. I don’t think any scale form is applicable to such.

> The radiation is stronger in one half of the sky than the other. There is also a large “cold” spot where the temperature is below average.

That’s overstating it. Both are small enough to be random fluctuations. For the cold spot you can’t really draw conclusions from a statistical event based on a sample size of one.

The only way I can see to resolve whether these are real or random is to look beyond the bulk of the cosmic microwave background to try and pick up some tail of the temperature distribution from a slightly earlier epoch.