Starship Asterisk*

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/universe-age-planck-space-probe-date-big-bang_n_2922818.html wrote:

Geo. Efstathiou: 'There's less stuff that we don't understand by a tiny amount.'

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Universe's Age? Planck Space Probe Data Push Back
Date Of Big Bang That Started It All
By LORI HINNANT & SETH BORENSTEIN, huffingtonpost, 03/21/13

<<PARIS -- New results from a look into the split second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought but the core concepts of the cosmos – how it began, what it's made of and where it's going – seem to be on the right track. The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second.

The Big Bang is the most comprehensive theory of the universe's beginning. It says the visible portion of the universe was smaller than an atom when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded rapidly, much faster than the speed of light.

The European Space Agency's Planck space probe looked back at the afterglow of the Big Bang, and those results have now added about 80 million years to the universe's age, putting it 13.81 billion years old.

The probe also found that the cosmos is expanding a bit slower than originally thought, has a little less of that mysterious dark energy than astronomers figured and a tad more normal matter. But scientists say those are small changes in calculations about the cosmos, nothing dramatic when dealing with numbers so massive.

"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 satellite mapping. "There's less stuff that we don't understand by a tiny amount."

The $900 million Planck space telescope was launched in 2009. It has spent 15 1/2 months mapping the sky, examining light fossils and sound echoes from the Big Bang by looking at the background radiation in the cosmos. The device is expected to keep transmitting data until late 2013, when it runs out of cooling fluid. Officials at NASA, which also was part of the experiment, said this provided a deeper understanding of the intricate history of the universe and its complex composition.

Outside scientists said the result confirms on a universal scale what the announcement earlier this month by a different European group confirmed on a subatomic scale – that they had found the Higgs boson particle which explains mass in the universe. "What a wonderful triumph of the mathematical approach to describing nature," said Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist who was not part of the new research. "It's an amazing story of discovery.">>

MargaritaMc wrote:http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/21 ... is-of-evil
The New Scientist link in bystander's post mentions 'axis of evil'. The Royal Astronomical Society has the above article. The New Scientist information is behind a subscription wall after the initial link.

M

PS. Later edit, answering my own query!

margaritaMc wrote:PS. Later edit, answering my own query!

bystander wrote:

MargaritaMc wrote:http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/21 ... f-evil----

PS. Later edit, answering my own query!

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=24503

Beyond wrote:

margaritaMc wrote:PS. Later edit, answering my own query!

Answering your own query You've only got two posts in this thread. Where the heck did you hide your query that you answered

MargaritaMc wrote:

Beyond wrote:

margaritaMc wrote:PS. Later edit, answering my own query!

Answering your own query You've only got two posts in this thread. Where the heck did you hide your query that you answered

SORRY! I should have left what I'd asked - it was just asking what 'axis of evil' implied in this context, as Google, Wikipedia and my memory could only supply George Bush's use of the term (and a comedy group). I didn't stop to think that my PS was nonsensical once I'd found out what it implied by doing a more specific search. Put it down to what is euphemistically known as a 'Senior Moment'...

Psnarf wrote
I hosed my boot sequence.

MargaritaMc wrote:

Psnarf wrote
I hosed my boot sequence.

Margarita says -- What does THAT mean??! :

owlice wrote: His computer made (or had) a boo-boo... apparently with his help!

http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meanin ... n-of/hosed
http://www.techterms.com/definition/bootsequence

[i]A new view of the cosmic microwave background , as seen over the whole sky with the Planck satellite. Although analyses of this image indicate complete agreement with the simple model of a big bang inflation, a new paper suggests the agreement is so perfect that it is very unlikely the inflation model is actually the correct one. [b](Credit: ESA/Planck)[/b][/i]

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The universe was created about fourteen billion years ago in a blaze of light known as the big bang. After about 380,000 years or so, once matter had cooled enough for neutral atoms (mostly hydrogen atoms) to form, light was able to travel through space relatively freely. We see that light today as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). The light is extremely uniform across the sky, but not perfectly so: Astronomers have discovered that the radiation actually has very faint ripples and bumps in it at a level of only about one part in ten thousand. These ripples reflect the architecture of the universe when the light was freed, and are the cosmic seeds for subsequent cosmic structures, like galaxies.

The CMBR was discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1964. Those faint ripples were first spotted by the NASA’s COBE satellite in 1991, and they have been studied in increasing detail during the past decade with NASA’s WMAP satellite (as well as with millimeter ground-based telescopes). Last month, the European Space Agency announced the first results from its Planck satellite, launched in 2009 to study the CMBR with greater precision than ever before. They reported excellent agreement with current models, and updated some of the key values, for example finding that the age of the universe is 13.82 billion years. But the precisions of WMAP and especially Planck allow astronomers to think about more than just how galaxies developed after the matter cooled. They enable consideration of what happened in the invisible era, before the matter had cooled. The pivotal event of that epoch is thought to have occurred right at the start, within less than a fraction of the first second: inflation.

According to models of inflation proposed in the 1980’s, based on concepts in elementary particle physics, the early universe underwent a dramatic and exponential growth spurt, swelling in size a trillion trillion trillion times. The power of this theory is that it explains many otherwise mysterious properties of the universe; for example, why distant regions located in opposite directions of space seem to be so very similar (and likewise, why do the CMBR ripples look everywhere so extremely similar to one another)? After all, the regions might be so far apart (both then and now) that they should have matured in completely independent ways? Inflation provides a solution by starting them all off rather close together and only then, somewhat later, pushing them quickly very far apart. The ideas of inflation have been constantly refined over the decades and numerous variations have been elaborated. The new Planck measurements seem to lend support.

Or maybe not. CfA astronomers Anna Ijjas, Paul Steinhardt, and Avi Loeb have just published a paper arguing that the new Planck results, far from lending credibility to ideas of inflation, actually undermine them. Indeed, they argue that they pose a challenge to cosmology overall. The scientists point out that the results of Planck are actually too good, because they disfavor the simplest versions of inflation and favor with high precision only a very particular version. Yet, they argue, if one accepts the most basic principles of the inflationary paradigm, this particular version is, actually a very unlikely compared to the simplest. For this and other reasons all related to the new Planck data, the whole edifice of inflation may be in trouble. There are alternative ideas that have been proposed over the years to inflation. Perhaps the new Planck results and the criticisms in this new paper will prompt some provocative new reconsideration of modern cosmology.

• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1304.2785 > 09 Apr 2013

ErnieM wrote:
The above two images, though similar, don't look the same.
In my eyes, anyway. Are they from the same ESA Planck data sets?

http://www.space.com/20328-universe-older-planck-spacecraft-map.html wrote:

[u]Two Cosmic Microwave Background anomalies[/u] hinted at by the Planck observatory's predecessor, NASA's WMAP, are confirmed in new high-precision data revealed on March 21, 2013. [b][u][color=#0000FF]In this image, the two anomalous regions have been enhanced with red and blue shading to make them more clearly visible.[/color][/u][/b] CREDIT: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

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