Beyond the Galaxy by Siegel Ethan

Author:Siegel, Ethan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814667180
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.7This is a simulated image of what the entire night sky would have looked like to Penzias and Wilson using the horn antenna. The green color represents a constant signal — present everywhere you look — and exists in all directions. The lone exception is a small plane of noise, shown in white, that corresponds to the location of our Milky Way galaxy, which has its own foreground emission in microwave wavelengths. The elliptical shape is due to the type of projection used in showing maps of the sky: a Mollweide projection. Inset, the Earth is shown in a Mollweide projection for comparison. Image credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team; Wikimedia Commons user Strebe under c.c.-by-s.a.-3.0 (inset).

Not everyone was convinced by this discovery, however. The Steady-State camp, upon learning of the existence of a uniform background of low-temperature radiation, came up with an alternative explanation: perhaps this was not radiation left over from the Big Bang, but rather was very old starlight, emitted from stars and galaxies strewn across the Universe. Since the Universe is expanding, that light would be redshifted, and since the Universe was constantly generating new matter, that redshifted light would interact with the newly created atoms, scattering and being re-emitted in all directions (Fig. 6.8).

In other words, they contended, finding a uniform background of low-temperature radiation does not necessarily mean that the Universe began from a hot, dense, expanding state a finite amount of time ago. Instead, it was possible that the low-temperature radiation is simply the light from stars arriving after billions of years, having been scattered by the matter present in the expanding Universe.

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