When humans, animals, and machines move throughout the world, they always push against something, whether it’s the ground, air, or water.
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The History & Structure of the Universe (Infographic).The Universe: Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps.While a curved universe seems very unlikely, only more data and more digging in will settle the dispute. So is Planck lying to us or not? The Planck Collaboration says yes the trio of astronomers (who also happen to be members of the Planck Collaboration) say no. (Note that this crisis is different than the one regarding potential differences in the expansion rate of the universe.) So when they go to mix in the other probes, they find a tension, because the other eyewitnesses tell us that we live in a flat universe - hence the controversy over a possible "crisis" in cosmology. They believe that Planck is telling the truth, by itself, about the curved universe. The answer? No curvature at all we live in a flat cosmos.Īccording to Planck team members, their own data aren't perfect trustworthy when it comes to curvature, and the measurements of the CMB have to be combined with other cosmological probes to get an accurate answer.īut the trio of astronomers took a different approach. The researchers combined the data from the Planck satellite with data from other observations, mixed them all together (in a statistically appropriate way) and asked the combined data set about the curvature of the universe. The Planck team took a straightforward approach. Thankfully, cosmologists have a lot to draw from, with measures aplenty that inform us about the curvature of the universe. And so to determine if Planck is lying to us or not, we need to ask some other eyewitnesses. You need multiple, unconnected people giving similar accounts of an incident before you can paint a reliable portrait.
The Planck Collaboration itself did a lot of analysis and checking, and came to the conclusion that our universe is really flat, but that some other contaminant is nudging the data to make it look curved.īut more recently, a trio of astronomers performed their own analysis and came to the opposite conclusion: Planck is not a liar, and the universe is indeed curved (opens in new tab).Īsk any detective, and they'll tell you that eyewitness testimony is always shaky. Planck is lying to us, and either something in the instrument itself or some other astronomical source (for example, pesky interstellar dust) is making the universe look curved, but it really is flat. Planck is telling the truth, and the universe just might be curved. Taking the Planck data hinting at a curved universe in isolation, we have two possible options: This is intriguing because everything we know through our theory of the Big Bang suggests that instead our universe should be very, very flat. The measurement isn't significant enough to be considered ironclad, but it's still suggestive. Planck did a really good job, measuring the CMB to the greatest level of precision yet, with its most recent data released in 2018.Īnd if you look at the bare, raw, naked data of the CMB as recorded by Planck, it seems that our universe might just prefer to be closed. The Planck satellite, a joint effort between NASA and the ESA, was the latest effort to map the CMB across the whole sky. Related: Cosmic Microwave Background: Big Bang Relic Explained (Infographic) That light has spent the past 13.8 billion years racing to us, so we can study features in the CMB to test our universe for flatness. Light beams should stay on the straight and narrow over billions of years, so we can use distant probes to "smooth over" tiny little bumps and wiggles like those caused by galaxies and black holes, and look at the true, underlying geometry of the universe.Įnter the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a bath of light soaking the universe, left over from when our cosmos was just a baby, only 380,000 years old. To test the geometry of space-time, we need to look at all sorts of distant sources and determine if the light from those sources has undergone any major deviations in its path to us.
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