How the Universe got its Spots

Abstract

The universe displays a three-dimensional pattern of hot and cold spots in the radiation remnant from the big bang. The global geometry of the universe can be revealed in the spatial distribution of these spots. In a topologically compact universe, distinctive patterns are especially prominent in spatial correlations of the radiation temperature. Whereas these patterns are usually washed out in statistical averages, we propose a scheme which uses the universe's spots to observe global geometry in a manner analogous to the use of multiple images of a gravitationally lensed quasar to study the geometry of the lens. To demonstrate how the geometry of space forms patterns in observations of the microwave sky, we develop a simple real-space approximation to estimate temperature correlations for any set of cosmological parameters and any global geometry. We present correlated spheres which clearly show geometric pattern formation for compact flat universes as well as for the compact negatively curved space introduced by Weeks and another discovered by Best. These examples illustrate how future satellite-based observations of the microwave background can determine the full geometry of the universe.

16 pages, 26 figures

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Cited by in corpus (21)

• Topology and the Cosmic Microwave Background
• The Cosmic Microwave Background and Particle Physics
• Cosmic microwave background anisotropies in multi-connected flat spaces
• Eigenmodes of 3-dimensional spherical spaces and their application to cosmology
• What Can WMAP Tell Us About The Very Early Universe? New Physics as an Explanation of Suppressed Large Scale Power and Running Spectral Index
• Simulating Cosmic Microwave Background maps in multi-connected spaces
• Is The Universe Infinite Or Is It Just Really Big?
• The twin paradox in compact spaces
• CMB Anisotropy in Compact Hyperbolic Universes I: Computing Correlation Functions
• The Isotropy of Compact Universes
• A Topological Signature in Cosmic Topology
• The study of topology of the universe using multipole vectors
• Topology beyond the horizon: how far can it be probed?
• Topological signatures in CMB temperature anisotropy maps
• Detectability of Cosmic Topology in Flat Universes
• How large is our universe?
• Topology of the universe from COBE-DMR; a wavelet approach
• The Copernican Principle in Compact Spacetimes
• Path Integrals on Euclidean Space Forms
• Topology of space at sub-quark level and masses of quarks and leptons
• Holomorphic Path Integrals in Tangent Space for Flat Manifolds