New CMB data from Planck indicates significant anomalies that appear to be inconsistent with standard inflation theories.
I’m not reading that it’s causing problems with inflation, per se. More like the opposite. From Ars Technica’s article:
However the axis of evil itself is bizarre. You have light that becomes specially polarized in it’s vicinity and even the axes of galaxies that line up with it.
I perused the links. Is there an expectation that the universe is more homogeneous? Is the suspicion that the singularity at the big bang was homogeneous?
Looks like the cold spot is where God was standing when the universe went bang. The scientists need to become cosmic spatter experts.
Also, what a relief…only 95.1% of the universe is mysterious matter/energy and not 95.5%!
Std inflation predicts a more homogeneous universe than what we are seeing from the latest data although Zen seems to be saying that we are still within a certain margin of error.
However I think the axis of evil phenomenon negates that. The asymmetry associated with that is not only real but gives rises to a couple of very odd and dramatic phenomena of its own, such as causing the axes of over 1600 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky survey to line up with it - something the probability of which has been calculated as being well below 1%
No, you need the Planck ointment for that.
Here (from 2008) is a possible explanation for the axis of evil asymmetry that implies a pan-universal scalar field that pre-dates the big bang (at least that’s the best I can make of it - still waiting for our cosmologists to join in).
To expand on ZenBeam’s post, the new data indeed firm up the inflationary picture compared the what was known before. The scale parameter (which comes from a somewhat arbitrary parametrization but nonetheless provides a convenient, predictable quantity) sets the amount of subtle variation present in the CMB power spectrum across wavenumber. The new measurement is n[sub]s[/sub] = 0.9603 +/- 0.0073, a greater than 5-sigma difference from perfect scale invariance and right in the wheelhouse of the most straightforward inflationary models, which predict a value of n[sub]s[/sub] in the 0.93 to 0.98 range.
There are statements out there that say things like “The new Planck data severely constrain the range of possible inflationary models.” In case this might get misinterpreted: this is a positive, not negative, statement for inflation. The new data puts excellent new constraints on the sorts of inflation models that are allowed, but the ones that remain allowed are well-matched to the data.
The “Axis of Evil” is a thorn in the side of cosmology, and it’s done its job to generate scores of theoretical papers (like the one deltasigma noted). However, Planck didn’t add much new information here. The anomalies are at low multipoles, which means they appear on the sky at large angular scales. Planck’s additional power over earlier CMB measurements, though, is at high multipoles.
This is natural since any anomaly that appears as a feature across the full sky will be noticed even by an instrument with poor angular resolution. Unfortunately we’ll never get more statistical precision on these low-l anomalies since we have only one sky to observe. (In the jargon, this is known as “cosmic variance”, and these low-l measurements are limited entirely by cosmic variance at this point.) Thus, the anomalies are still a “problem”(*), but not any more of a problem then they were before.
(*) Of course, one person’s problem is another person’s journal article, etc. There are some subtleties in the statistical analysis of the axis of evil that make the level of significance difficult to pin down, and it’s at the annoying 2- to 3-sigma level where things tend to pop up and then go away. Only this time, due to cosmic variance, it’s can’t go away with more data even if it’s fundamentally a statistical fluctuation.
I’m not an expert, but George Efstathiou, who presented the Planck data in Paris, is quoted here (German article) in reference to the measurement of the scale parameter, saying (my translation):
So it seems that the general opinion is that the Planck data reinforce inflation rather than refute it.
ETA: Here’s also an English source for the quote.
I was really hoping to hear about satellite based lasers shooting the herpes off of people’s faces.
<SLAPS Darth Panda WITH A WET DARKMATTER TROUT>
I wasn’t going to do this since it seemed like more effort than it was worth and no one seems to actually read anything I post anyway, but . . . what the fuck.
I put ‘std’ in the title for a reason. That reason, as explained in the next to the last line of the OP quote and as is more poignantly highlighted if you go to the ‘axis’ link, is that the simplest inflation theories imply uniformity in the CMB - for anyone who was texting during astrophysics, that means no significant anomalies.
So I was never implying inflation as an idea is dead, just the simplest but also most elegant version of it.
edit: Oh, and the reason this wasn’t previously a big deal despite being known from the WMAP data, is because it wasn’t clear that the data there was completely unambiguous. This data is.