If our universe slammed into a neighboring one during a growth spurt in its first second, the collision would have left a mark. Half of the young cosmos was slightly coarser than the other.
Details about the Higgs Boson also suggest that there is a multiverse.
"“When they smack into each other, there’s kind of a shock wave that propagates into our universe,” said Kleban, an associate professor of physics at New York University. Such a shock wave — if that’s what the image shows — would be evidence in support of the multiverse hypothesis, a well-known but unproven idea that ours is one of infinite universes that bubbled into existence inside a larger vacuum.
The asymmetry of our universe appears in the cosmic microwave background — the staticky afterglow from the moment the universe became transparent, 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The fog of charged particles that until then had enshrouded the cosmos cooled down enough to congeal into neutral atoms, freeing light to travel unimpeded through space for the first time. Over the past three years, the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite captured a 50-megapixel image of this light coming from all directions, each photon imprinted with a record of the temperature where it originated more than 13 billion years ago.
Some cosmologists chalk it up to a statistical fluke. The odds that quantum fluctuations at the birth of the universe could have randomly generated the observed asymmetry are between 0.1 and 1 percent — about the same as a repeatedly tossed coin coming up heads eight times in a row.
Cosmologists have already advanced several competing theories to explain how events during and immediately after the Big Bang could have carved this asymmetry into the cosmos.
Few believe the toy model, with its inflation field plopped into place, can fully explain what jumpstarted the universe. Instead, the field could be one of the extra, curled-up dimensions of space that are postulated by a hypothetical “theory of everything” called string theory, which would likely involve more than one inflation field. In a paper posted to the physics preprint site arXiv.org in May, John McDonald, a cosmologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, showed that a two-field model could have caused the asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background as long as the second field, called a curvaton, decayed after inflation ended and after the formation of dark matter.
An unexplained feature appears in the Planck satellite image of the early universe: At the largest scales, temperature fluctuations are more extreme in the half of the sky to the right of the gray line than to the left. (Image: ESA and the Planck Collaboration)
Arxiv - Planck 2013 results. XXIII. Isotropy and Statistics of the CMB
Read more »
Reposted via Next Big Future
Details about the Higgs Boson also suggest that there is a multiverse.
"“When they smack into each other, there’s kind of a shock wave that propagates into our universe,” said Kleban, an associate professor of physics at New York University. Such a shock wave — if that’s what the image shows — would be evidence in support of the multiverse hypothesis, a well-known but unproven idea that ours is one of infinite universes that bubbled into existence inside a larger vacuum.
The asymmetry of our universe appears in the cosmic microwave background — the staticky afterglow from the moment the universe became transparent, 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The fog of charged particles that until then had enshrouded the cosmos cooled down enough to congeal into neutral atoms, freeing light to travel unimpeded through space for the first time. Over the past three years, the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite captured a 50-megapixel image of this light coming from all directions, each photon imprinted with a record of the temperature where it originated more than 13 billion years ago.
Some cosmologists chalk it up to a statistical fluke. The odds that quantum fluctuations at the birth of the universe could have randomly generated the observed asymmetry are between 0.1 and 1 percent — about the same as a repeatedly tossed coin coming up heads eight times in a row.
Cosmologists have already advanced several competing theories to explain how events during and immediately after the Big Bang could have carved this asymmetry into the cosmos.
Few believe the toy model, with its inflation field plopped into place, can fully explain what jumpstarted the universe. Instead, the field could be one of the extra, curled-up dimensions of space that are postulated by a hypothetical “theory of everything” called string theory, which would likely involve more than one inflation field. In a paper posted to the physics preprint site arXiv.org in May, John McDonald, a cosmologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, showed that a two-field model could have caused the asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background as long as the second field, called a curvaton, decayed after inflation ended and after the formation of dark matter.
An unexplained feature appears in the Planck satellite image of the early universe: At the largest scales, temperature fluctuations are more extreme in the half of the sky to the right of the gray line than to the left. (Image: ESA and the Planck Collaboration)
Arxiv - Planck 2013 results. XXIII. Isotropy and Statistics of the CMB
Read more »
Reposted via Next Big Future
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