“When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.” –Jenna Morasca
The hot Big Bang — proposed seventy years ago — is a tremendous success story. Predicated on the assumption that the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and expanding faster in the past, it’s allowed us to predict the rate of cosmic expansion over distance and time, the primeval abundances of the light elements, the formation and evolution of large-scale-structure, and the existence and properties of the cosmic microwave background: the leftover photon glow from the Big Bang.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
All these predictions have been borne out, but there’s one more prediction that has yet to be tested: the existence and properties of a cosmic neutrino background. A new technique taking advantage of data from the Planck satellite has just detected the cosmic neutrino background definitively and in a new way, with the subsequent polarization spectra — set to be released by the Planck team — ready to confirm the greatest prediction of all: the cosmic neutrino background’s temperature!
Image credit: Brent Follin, Lloyd Knox, Marius Millea, and Zhen PanPhys. Rev. Lett. 115, 091301 — Published 26 August 2015.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1JNxObw
“When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.” –Jenna Morasca
The hot Big Bang — proposed seventy years ago — is a tremendous success story. Predicated on the assumption that the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and expanding faster in the past, it’s allowed us to predict the rate of cosmic expansion over distance and time, the primeval abundances of the light elements, the formation and evolution of large-scale-structure, and the existence and properties of the cosmic microwave background: the leftover photon glow from the Big Bang.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
All these predictions have been borne out, but there’s one more prediction that has yet to be tested: the existence and properties of a cosmic neutrino background. A new technique taking advantage of data from the Planck satellite has just detected the cosmic neutrino background definitively and in a new way, with the subsequent polarization spectra — set to be released by the Planck team — ready to confirm the greatest prediction of all: the cosmic neutrino background’s temperature!
Image credit: Brent Follin, Lloyd Knox, Marius Millea, and Zhen PanPhys. Rev. Lett. 115, 091301 — Published 26 August 2015.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1JNxObw
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