Character of the Cosmos
The Face of our Universe
The Cosmic Camera - Planck CMB Space Probe
Like all living forms, character routes are planted at birth and builds over time from events. The CMB (the Cosmic Microwave Background) gives us a picture of our Universe when it was born and shows how it evolved into the structure we see now.
Recent Measurements Made of the CMB
In 21 March 2013, the European-led research team behind the Planck cosmology probe released the mission's all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background. The map suggests our universe is slightly older than thought. According to the map, subtle fluctuations in temperature were imprinted on the deep sky when the cosmos was about 370,000 years old. The imprint reflects ripples that arose as early, in the existence of the universe, as the first nonillionth (10^−30) of a second which could be explained by the energy made available when time was applied. These ripples represent the energy available to form particles that gave rise to the present vast cosmic web of galaxy clusters. According to the team, the universe was 13.798±0.037billion years old, and contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy as shown in the graph in the Birth section (time = NOW). Also, the Hubble constant was measured to be 67.80 ± 0.77 (km/s)/Mpc. The results also revise downwards (from earlier WMAP results) the proportion of the universe made up by dark energy from 74% to 68.3%, while dark matter accounts for 26.8% of the total (up from 24%) and ordinary matter 4.9% (up from 4.6%). This fits well with my theory that dark energy is the source energy producing dark and ordinary matter.
Dark Energy Loss: The measurements of 74% drop to 68.3% seems unlikely over the short timescale measured, mainly due to accuracy of measurement because that change would infer dark energy will be depleted in about 110 years! Most of the drop since the beginning would have occurred during the sudden creation and inflation (big bang) of space and creation of matter. So 100-68 = 32% has been used up over 13.8 billion years but I suspect that, during the initial inflation, nearer 30% was consumed (estimated from the inflation part of the graph in Birth section). Which leaves only 2% consumption over 13 .8 billion years. If this is true, and the change is linear, the universe will stop expanding after 98/2 x 13.8 = 676 billion years when the Dark Energy is depleted! See Growth section which explains how the quantum fluctuations are creating space that appears (from our viewpoint) that our universe has an accelerating expansion.
The Raw CMB Image
Two Cosmic Microwave Background anomalous features hinted at by Planck’s predecessor, NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), are confirmed in the new high precision data from Planck. One is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky (indicated by the curved line), with slightly higher average temperatures in the southern ecliptic hemisphere and slightly lower average temperatures in the northern ecliptic hemisphere. This runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look. There is also a cold spot that extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected (circled). In this image the anomalous regions have been enhanced with red and blue shading to make them more clearly visible. But there is an explanation.
The Dipole Correction
This dipole was the result of our Galaxy moving at 600 km/sec with respect to the CMB radiation, and it is now known that this reflects the motion of the Local Group of galaxies towards the Great Attractor (see the page on Gravity). Once the cosmic microwave background dipole is removed, the variation in the temperature of the CMB is astonishingly uniform with variations of only one part in ten thousand
The Corrected Cosmic Microwave Background
Before the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was released, photons and ordinary particles were tightly coupled together, forming a single ‘fluid’ of matter and radiation. As soon as the two species decoupled from one another (at the time of recombination, 380,000 years after the so-called 'Big Bang'), photons started to propagate freely across the Universe, eventually reaching the detectors in the instruments on board Planck.
The photons carry a memory of how matter and radiation were distributed at the time of the decoupling. If, at the time of decoupling, a photon was in a slightly denser portion of space, it had to spend some of its energy against the gravitational attraction of the denser region to move away from it, thus becoming slightly colder than the average temperature of photons. Vice versa, photons that were located in a slightly less dense portion of space, lost less energy upon leaving it than other photons, thus appearing slightly hotter than average. This is why temperature fluctuations in the CMB reflect the pattern of structure in the matter that was present in the early Universe, right when the CMB was released. The CMB can therefore be considered as the ultimate snapshot of our Universe at the time of recombination.
These primordial fluctuations in the density of matter in the early Universe are the seeds of the rich network of cosmic structure – stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters – that we observe today. Currently, the most widely accepted explanation for their origin is in the context of cosmic inflation. According to the inflationary paradigm, the exponential growth of the scale factor during inflation caused quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field to be stretched to macroscopic scales, and, upon leaving the horizon, to "freeze in". At the later stages of radiation- and matter-domination, these fluctuations re-entered the horizon, and thus set the initial conditions for structure formation.
The following 2 videos are a reasonable recent explanation of the beginning but do not relate much to quantum fluctuations or how dark energy could be the primal energy used by quantum fluctuations to create vacuum energy and particles which eventually become space, ordinary matter and dark matter.
In the beginning after the (so-called) big bang (simplified to only 3 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wYw7p5MMNg
How particles, matter, galaxies and universe were formed (a detailed explanation 12 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGCVTSQw7WU
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