[ExI] planck surveyor maps oldest light

[BillK]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 3:58 AM, spike wrote:
> This boggles the hell out of my mind.  Why should there be features or
> asymmetry at all?  If I had been there before the Big Bang, I would have
> predicted the expansion of the early universe should have produced a
> perfectly uniform inflation.  But that apparently isn’t what happened:
>
> The more I ponder this map, the crazier it seems to me.  How did asymmetry
> of any kind ever form?  Why did matter clump here but not there?  What was
> wrong with there?  What was right with here?
>

It goes right back to quantum instability at the lowest level.

>From the Planck site:
<http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck/Planck_reveals_an_almost_perfect_Universe>

 The image is based on the initial 15.5 months of data from Planck and
is the mission’s first all-sky picture of the oldest light in our
Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380 000 years old.
At that time, the young Universe was filled with a hot dense soup of
interacting protons, electrons and photons at about 2700ºC. When the
protons and electrons joined to form hydrogen atoms, the light was set
free. As the Universe has expanded, this light today has been
stretched out to microwave wavelengths, equivalent to a temperature of
just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

This ‘cosmic microwave background’ – CMB – shows tiny temperature
fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different
densities at very early times, representing the seeds of all future
structure: the stars and galaxies of today.
According to the standard model of cosmology, the fluctuations arose
immediately after the Big Bang and were stretched to cosmologically
large scales during a brief period of accelerated expansion known as
inflation.
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Phil Platt has a good article at:
<http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/21/age_of_the_universe_planck_results_show_universe_is_13_82_billion_years.html>

Quote:
The light from the early Universe shows it’s not smooth. If you crank
the contrast way up you see slightly brighter and slightly dimmer
spots. These correspond to changes in temperature of the Universe on a
scale of 1 part in 100,000. That’s incredibly small, but has profound
implications. We think those fluctuations were imprinted on the
Universe when it was only a trillionth of a trillionth of a second
old, and they grew with the Universe as it expanded. They were also
the seeds of the galaxies and the clusters and galaxies we see today.

What started out as quantum fluctuations when the Universe was smaller
than a proton have now grown to be the largest structures in the
cosmos, hundreds of millions of light years across. Let that settle in
your brain a moment.
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BillK