Cosmic Microwave Background

(thing) by quantumet (3 y) (print) ? 1 C! Sat Mar 11 2000 at 10:21:22

The Microwave background radiation is a remnant of the Big Bang, an ambient background heat residue like the afterglow of a fire. It's temperature is about 2.7 Kelvin, not far above absolute zero, and dropping slowly. It's the average temperature of the universe, or pretty close to it.

In the beginning, the universe was small, and very, very hot. Now, it's big, and much, much, colder. So the temperature has dropped, to so low where it's very hard to find.

In fact, it was first discovered by some Bell Labs people in New Jersey who were working on a microwave communications antenna. They were very dilligent in the jobs, and managed to filter out just about all the static the antenna itself was creating. But they still kept getting a uniform noise of microwave radiation no matter where they pointed the antenna. Kind of like the white static you see on TV while nothing's on. Coincidentally, they had lunch with some researchers from Princeton a few days later, who'd just realized that theoretically, such a microwave background would have to exist if the Big Bang happened. Later, the Bell Labs people won a Nobel prize for this work. (I am told, specifically, that Arno Penzias won the Nobel for this). Of course, how factual this story is is anyone's guess; I heard it from my physics professor, who works in the field.

The COBE satellite produced a very accurate map of the microwave background radiation over all the sky, and detected very small temperature variances in it. This was a good thing, since some sort of irregularity was needed to explain things like galaxies and us. This is because the temperature differences are related to the clumping of matter in the early universe. No clumps, no galaxies.

The microwave background radiation is one of the stronger pieces of supporting evidence for the big bang. When compared to a standard blackbody spectrum, this radiation is more perfectly blackbody than anything we can create in a laboratory. In other words, the Universe is cooling very much according to theory.

More experiments are underway to scan the radiation with more detail. This information can be used for things such as determining whether the universe will keep on expanding, whether it'll recollapse, or whether it's right in the middle.

In other words, the microwave background radiation is cool stuff. A more recent, and more detailed survey of the microwave background was done by the BOOMERanG Project

(thing) by lazyr (4.6 y) (print) ? 1 C! Mon Aug 21 2000 at 22:34:33

Actually, the first thing gleaned from the COBE microwave background radiation map was that Earth is actually moving through the universe.

The map showed a slightly higher temperature on one half-sphere of the sky than on the other, due to the doppler effect. From this, scientists could conclude not only that Earth was moving through the universe, but also that it was moving in that direction and at a certain speed relative to the background radiation.

After filtering out this strong temperature difference, another, smaller, movement was found. This one, iirc, was due to Earth's movement through the solar system, while the former was a result of sol's movement around the milky way.

Only now could the irregularities described in the above node be seen.

Another strong piece of evidence supporting the big bang is using the second law of thermodynamics in reverse. It says that the entropy in the universe never decreases with time, which means that, going back through time, it must decrease, due to e.g. friction. Therefore, at some point in the past, the universe must have been in a state of total order (no entropy) and extreme heat. This could supposedly only be achieved if the universe's volume was very very small. Sounds like the start of a big bang, don't you think?

printable version
chaos

2.7 kelvins	Ask out the girl of your dreams	redshift resolves Olbers' paradox	blackbody radiation
COBE	Gravity Probe B	BOOMERanG Project	dark energy
Why matter cannot reach the speed of light	cosmological inflation	blackbody	Sun Tzu in residential Canton Township
Microwave Astronomy	Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect	recombination	Fred Hoyle
Einstein Static Cosmology	The Big Bang happened here	microwave oven	Enjoy yourself. This is utmost in importance.
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe	National Scientific Ballooning Facility	Pushing gravity	Big Bang

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