An unexplained feature appears in the Planck satellite image of the
early universe: At the largest scales, temperature fluctuations are more
extreme in the half of the sky to the right of the gray line than to
the left.
And Matthew Kleban
thinks he sees it in the most detailed snapshot yet taken of the dawn
of the universe.
The satellite image, released by astronomers in March, confirmed what an earlier image suggested: Half of the young cosmos was slightly coarser than the other.
With few other leads about what went on in the early moments of the
universe, Kleban is among dozens of theoretical cosmologists trying to
piece together a cosmic origin story from the grainy shadow of a new
clue.
“When they smack into each other, there’s kind of a shock wave that
propagates into our universe,” said Kleban, an associate professor of
physics at New York University. Such a shock wave — if that’s what the
image shows — would be evidence in support of the multiverse hypothesis, a well-known but unproven idea that ours is one of infinite universes that bubbled into existence inside a larger vacuum.
For the rest of the story: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/cosmic-map-universe-origins/
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