New cosmic anomalies reported

Just when we thought we had it right. :-)

This may be evidence for my /\zpf as a LOCAL field that in large scale is Einstein's cosmological constant of the DeSitter solution? I don't know yet of course - speculation. Any connection to NASA Pioneer anomaly

a_g = -cH

that I say is a hedgehog defect in vacuum coherence (Wilczek cosmic superconductor) centered at Sun and probably ALL stars?

Remember dark zero point energy of negative pressure makes an anomalous blue shift and dark zero point energy of positive pressure makes an anomalous red shift. Therefore, what is being seen here may be exotic vacuum harmonics in the hedgehog defect centered at the Sun starting out at 20AU?

On Jan 29, 2005, at 4:48 PM, antigray@cs.com wrote:

Cosmic oddity casts doubt on theory of universe

By DAN FALK
Saturday, January 29, 2005

A new analysis of the "echo" of the Big Bang has left cosmologists scratching
their heads and could throw a monkey wrench into efforts to understand how
the universe began.

U.S. and European scientists analyzed the distribution of "hot" and "cold"
regions -- areas that are putting out greater or less amounts of energy than the
average -- of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the so-called echo).
What they found was unexpected: an apparent correlation between those hot and
cold spots and the orientation and motion of our solar system.

"All of this is mysterious," says Glenn Starkman, a Canadian physicist based
at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and one of the authors of a
recent paper in Physical Review Letters that outlined the finding. "And the
strange thing is, the more you delve into it, the more mysteries you find."

The study, by Case Western scientists and the European Centre for Nuclear
Research in Geneva, is based on data from the WMAP satellite, the NASA spacecraft
that began mapping the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in fine
detail in 2001.

The observed correlation is troubling on several fronts.

First of all, there is no reason to believe that the finding reflects any
physical connection between our local astronomical neighbourhood and the universe
at large.

As Dr. Starkman puts it: "None of us believe that the universe knows about
the solar system, or that the solar system knows about the universe."

Far more plausible, he says, is that something within our solar system is
producing or absorbing microwaves. That means that anyone doing cosmology would
have to take into account such "local" contamination.

(The correlation involves the largest-scale fluctuations of the CMB
radiation. If some of those fluctuations are a local rather than a cosmological
phenomenon, it would mean that the truly cosmological large-scale fluctuations are
even less intense than previously thought.)

There is, however, another possibility: The patterns seen by Dr. Starkman and
his colleagues might simply be a fluke -- an accidental alignment between the
solar system and patterns in the CMB radiation.

If the correlation is real, however, it could cast doubt on the popular
"inflation" model of the early universe. That model, which builds on the
well-established Big Bang theory, says the universe underwent a period of incredibly
rapid, exponential growth in the first split-second of its existence.

One of its predictions is that the universe should be nearly perfectly
"smooth," that the CMB fluctuations should be equally intense at all scales.

An analogy with a musical instrument can be helpful: If you hit a drum, you
hear many tones at the same time -- a primary tone as well as many overtones,
or "harmonics." The inflation model predicts that all the overtones in the CMB
should be equally intense, but instead "we're missing the bass," Dr. Starkman
says. "And what bass there is seems to be not generated by the universe, but
by something local."

Other physicists are responding with caution to the finding.

"There is no way to judge the real significance of such a result," says
Charles Bennett of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the leader
of the WMAP team.

It all depends on how we perceive "chance," and how we evaluate
probabilities, Dr. Bennett says. The alignments seen in the CMB may seem unlikely, he says,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that they require new physics to explain
them.

He points out that "improbable things happen frequently because there are
lots of opportunities for them to occur." In other words, he says, the newly
discovered CMB correlations are most likely the product of chance.

Dan Falk is a science journalist based in Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050129/BANG29/TPScience/