Five Year Results on the Oldest Light in the Universe
07 March 2008
NASA's has determined the following things from the data collected by the WMAP.
1. A sea of cosmic neutrinos permeates the universe
2. The first stars took more than a half-billion years to create a cosmic fog
3. More details of the expansion in the universe's first trillionth of a second
You must be thinking, “Wow. How can the WMAP see back in time 13.7 billion years ago and determine this?” Good question. Lets start with what the WMAP actually sees.
The WMAP looks a slice of space the size of the moon and measures the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBM). Apparently light will turn into CBM after it has traveled for several billion years because it has stretched out from visual, past infrared, to a microwave wavelength. Basically it looks at two different points of the sky and measures the temperature. The temperature fluctuation can be graphed vs its angular size (second picture) and this reveals some peaks.
The third peak is supposedly now the best evidence of neutrinos in the universe. Since neutrinos can not be directly observed, the assumption is that they are what cause this peak.
The dispersement of the cosmic fog would require millions of years to happen naturally the way it is seen.
The details of the first trillionth of a second are determined from assumptions about the other data.
1. Is it possible that something else is causing that third peak?
2. Is is possible that something else caused the fog?
3. How can billion year old microwave tell you about a trillionth of a second?
This is another example of a large amount of inference being made from a little data. All you know is exactly what you see. You see microwaves that are at certain angles. Using that to prove beyond a doubt anything but what is observed is not possible. This would be like me hearing a horn honk from a mile away and being able to determine the reason they honked, where they were going, and how old the driver was.
http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/index.html
