The Universe Is More Complex Than We Thought, Based On This Cosmic CT Scan
The data from two different astronomical surveys has helped researchers build a “cosmic CT scan” of the evolution of the universe.
The images reveal that forces like gravity have reshaped the universe, causing it to become less clumpy. As a result, the universe has become much more complex than expected.
The research team used data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to come up with these conclusions.
The data allowed the team to layer cosmic time, which they did by stacking ancient photographs of the cosmos over recent images of the universe. This gave them a more multidimensional perspective of the universe.
“This process is like a cosmic CT scan, where we can look through different slices of cosmic history and track how matter clumped together at different epochs,” said Mathew Madhavacheril, a co-leader of the study from the University of Pennsylvania.
“It gives us a direct look into how the gravitational influence of matter changed over billions of years.”
The team needed to study ancient light in order to put together the image of the universe. With light that is nearly as old as the universe itself, it was possible for them to track the changes that the universe experienced as gravity altered it over the course of about 13.8 billion years.
“ACT, covering approximately 23 percent of the sky, paints a picture of the universe’s infancy by using a distant, faint light that’s been traveling since the Big Bang,” said Joshua Kim, a team co-leader and a graduate researcher.
“Formally, this light is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), but we sometimes just call it the universe’s baby picture because it’s a snapshot of when it was around 380,000 years old.”
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The CMB light is a result from an event that occurred shortly after the Big Bang. The event was called the “last scattering.”
It took place when the universe had expanded and cooled down enough for protons and electrons to form the first neutral atoms of hydrogen.
When free electrons disappeared, it meant that photons, also known as light particles, could travel without being scattered endlessly. So, the universe went from being opaque to transparent.
The CMB has often been described as a “cosmic fossil,” but that doesn’t mean it has remained unchanged for billions of years.
The universe’s expansion caused its photons to shift to longer wavelengths and lose energy. Its temperature is now at -454 degrees Fahrenheit.
Light from the CMB has also warped while passing large, heavy, and dense structures like galaxy clusters because mass distorts the fabric of spacetime. Scientists can learn a lot about the evolution of matter by looking at how CMB has warped over time.
The ACT data shows the CMB in its youth, while the DESI has a record of the universe in its later stages. Combining the data depicts the evolution of the galaxies.
The team noticed a small discrepancy that suggested cosmic structures haven’t evolved in the way experts thought they would.
The researchers plan to continue their work with more powerful telescopes to obtain more accurate measurements. Their study was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
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