From Astrobites : “The Origin of the Origin of the Universe”

Astrobites bloc

From Astrobites

2.4.23
Katherine Lee

Title: Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum by the COBE FIRAS Instrument

Authors: J. C. Mather, E. S. Cheng, D. A. Cottingham, R. E. Eplee Jr., D. J. Fixsen, T. Hewagama, R. B. Isaacman, K. A. Jensen, S. S. Meyer, P. D. Noerdlinger, S. M. Read, L. P. Rosen, R. A. Shafer, E. L. Wright, C. L. Bennett, N. W. Boggess, M. G. Hauser, T. Kelsall, S. H. Moseley Jr., R. F. Silverberg, G. F. Smoot, R. Weiss, and D. T. Wilkinson

First Author’s Institution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA

Status: published in ApJ [open access]

Back in the mid-20th century, there were two competing theories about the origin of the Universe. Scientists, including Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître, had already established that space was expanding.

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Edwin Hubble

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Some argued that if you run this expansion back in time, it implies a beginning when everything must have been compressed into a hot, dense singularity, exploding outward from that point in a “Big Bang”. Other astronomers, however, were uncomfortable with the idea that the Universe even had an origin at all. These scientists, most notably Fred Hoyle, argued instead for a cosmology in which the Universe had always existed and had always been expanding, with new galaxies springing up periodically to fill in the gaps. This picture of our Universe is referred to as the “Steady State Theory”.

These two theories predict fundamentally different things about the background temperature of the Universe. If matter in the Universe does not originate from a single point, as in the Steady State picture, then we would expect the background radiation to be chaotic in nature; there would be no reason for different unconnected regions of spacetime to look the same as each other.

However, if everything in the Universe comes from the same initial conditions, then everything should be roughly the same temperature. This can also be expressed as the idea that the Universe should be in thermodynamic equilibrium on large scales, and that if you measure the intensity of background radiation at all frequencies, you should see a blackbody spectrum—the characteristic spectrum of an object in equilibrium, dependent only on the object’s temperature. Thus, a key prediction of the Big Bang theory is that the temperature should be nearly constant over the entire sky, with the differences (called anisotropies) from this constant average temperature being extremely small—around one part in 100,000!

COBE comes to the rescue

Big Bang cosmologists in the 1960s believed that the peak of the Universe’s blackbody spectrum should be in the microwave frequency range, defined as between 300 MHz and 300 GHz. This would be expected from a massive explosion of energy at the Big Bang, the light from which would have been redshifted into the microwave range as it traveled through the expanding universe. So, if the Big Bang theory is true, we should expect to see a constant source of background radiation coming from all directions in the microwave sky: a so-called Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB.

The detection of this CMB radiation in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, as well as the cosmological interpretation of that detection by Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles, Peter Roll, and David Wilkinson, laid the groundwork for modern cosmology, and was the beginning of the end for the idea that the Universe had no origin.

However, Penzias and Wilson’s discovery was not an accurate measurement of the CMB’s temperature or spectrum. No anisotropies had been detected, and there was still debate over whether or not the CMB spectrum was truly a blackbody. The goal of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, launched by NASA in 1989, was to answer these lingering questions.

COBE was split into three instruments: the Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR), the Far-InfraRed Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS), and the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE). DMR measured the CMB anisotropies, while DIRBE mapped infrared radiation from foreground dust.

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igure 1: A diagram of the FIRAS instrument, taken from Figure 1a of Mather et. al. (1999).

FIRAS, meanwhile, was designed to measure the CMB spectrum. It scanned the entire sky multiple times in order to minimize errors, and measured the temperature over a wide range of frequencies between 30 and FIRAS, meanwhile, was designed to measure the CMB spectrum. It scanned the entire sky multiple times in order to minimize errors and measured the temperature over a wide range of frequencies between 30 and nearly 3000 GHz. After eliminating known sources of interference such as cosmic rays, as well as subtracting the effects of light from the Milky Way galaxy and of the Doppler shift caused by the movement of the Earth through space, these scans were then averaged together to create direct measurements of the CMB intensity at various frequencies.

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Figure 2: The cosmic microwave background spectrum, as measured by FIRAS. It shows a near-perfect blackbody, with any deviations from total thermodynamic equilibrium being much too small to see. This plot is taken from Figure 4 of Fixsen et al. (1996), which notes that “uncertainties are a small fraction of the line thickness.”line thickness.”

The authors found that the background radiation in our universe is in fact extremely close to being a perfect bThe authors of today’s paper found that the background radiation in our Universe is in fact extremely close to being a perfect blackbody! The final temperature found by FIRAS was reported by Mather et al. (1999) to be 2.725 K, with an uncertainty of just 0.002 K! This is an incredibly high-precision measurement and represents the final nail in the coffin for cosmologies other than the Big Bang. John C. Mather received the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work as FIRAS’s project lead.

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Figure 3: A comparison of the abilities of the COBE [above], WMAP, and Planck satellites to resolve tiny fluctuations in the CMB temperature, called anisotropies. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA (Wikimedia Commons)




Today, cosmologists use the CMB and its anisotropies to characterize the early history of the universe, find galaxy clusters in the later universe, and even look for new physics! The COBE measurements represented the dawn of a new era in cosmology, and laid the groundwork for modern CMB measurements. The science we do toToday, cosmologists use the CMB and its anisotropies to characterize the early history of the Universe, find galaxy clusters in the later Universe, and even look for new physics! Later full-sky measurements taken by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Planck satellite added never-before-seen levels of precision to our ability to study the structure and content of the Universe, and future missions like LiteBIRD will continue to improve our ability to study the CMB even more closely, building on COBE’s groundbreaking data. These experiments still rely upon the CMB temperature established by FIRAS, which remains the definitive result even 23 years after its publication.

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Inflation

In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10^−36 seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to some time between 10^−33 and 10^−32 seconds after the singularity. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The acceleration of this expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old (5.4 billion years ago).

Inflation theory was developed in the late 1970s and early 80s, with notable contributions by several theoretical physicists, including Alexei Starobinsky at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Alan Guth at Cornell University, and Andrei Linde at Lebedev Physical Institute. Alexei Starobinsky, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize “for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation.” It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the Universe. Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the universe appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed evenly, why the universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed.

The detailed particle physics mechanism responsible for inflation is unknown. The basic inflationary paradigm is accepted by most physicists, as a number of inflation model predictions have been confirmed by observation; however, a substantial minority of scientists dissent from this position. The hypothetical field thought to be responsible for inflation is called the inflaton.

In 2002 three of the original architects of the theory were recognized for their major contributions; physicists Alan Guth of M.I.T., Andrei Linde of Stanford, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton shared the prestigious Dirac Prize “for development of the concept of inflation in cosmology”. In 2012 Guth and Linde were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their invention and development of inflationary cosmology.

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Alan Guth, from M.I.T., who first proposed Cosmic Inflation.

Alan Guth’s notes:
Alan Guth’s original notes on inflation.
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Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 Expansion of the Universe

4 October 2011

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011

with one half to

Saul Perlmutter
The Supernova Cosmology Project
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and The University of California-Berkeley,

and the other half jointly to

Brian P. SchmidtThe High-z Supernova Search Team, The Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia.

and

Adam G. Riess

The High-z Supernova Search Team,The Johns Hopkins University and The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.

Written in the stars

“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…” *

What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.

In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role.

The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called Type 1a supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.

The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

*Robert Frost, Fire and Ice, 1920
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