| Manu | Date: Thursday, 26-November-2020, 3:57 AM | Message # 1 |
--dragon lord--
Group: undead
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| by The Kavli Foundation
As the light of the cosmic microwave background emitted 13.8 billion years
Using Planck data from the cosmic microwave background radiation, an international team of researchers has observed a hint of new physics. The team developed a new method to measure the polarization angle of the ancient light by calibrating it with dust emission from our own Milky Way. While the signal is not detected with enough precision to draw definite conclusions, it may suggest that dark matter or dark energy causes a violation of the so-called "parity symmetry."
The laws of physics governing the universe are thought not to change when flipped around in a mirror. For example, electromagnetism works the same regardless of whether you are in the original system, or in a mirrored system in which all spatial coordinates have been flipped. If this symmetry, called "parity," is violated, it may hold the key to understanding the elusive nature of dark matter and dark energy, which occupy 25 and 70 percent of the energy budget of the universe today, respectively. While both dark, these two components have opposite effects on the evolution of the universe: dark matter attracts, while dark energy causes the universe to expand ever faster.
A new study, including researchers from the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies (IPNS) at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) of the University of Tokyo, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), reports on a tantalizing hint of new physics—with 99.2 percent confidence level —which violates parity symmetry. Their findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters on November 23, 2020; the paper was selected as the "Editors' Suggestion," judged by editors of the journal to be important, interesting, and well written.
The hint to a violation of parity symmetry was found in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the remnant light of the Big Bang. The key is the polarized light of the cosmic microwave background. Light is a propagating electromagnetic wave. When it consists of waves oscillating in a preferred direction, physicists call it "polarized." The polarization arises when the light is scattered. Sunlight, for instance, consists of waves with all possible oscillating directions; thus, it is not polarized. The light of a rainbow, meanwhile, is polarized because the sunlight is scattered by water droplets in the atmosphere. Similarly, the light of the cosmic microwave background initially became polarized when scattered by electrons 400,000 years after the Big Bang. As this light traveled through the universe for 13.8 billion years, the interaction of the cosmic microwave background with dark matter or dark energy could cause the plane of polarization to rotate by an angle β
Read more/full article/source -
https://phys.org/news....se.html
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