AUCKLAND, Dec 16: A powerful new telescope instrument at the South Pole has provided fresh evidence that the universe is accelerating outwards and is dominated by a strange form of matter nobody knows anything about, a new scientific study reveals.
Cosmologists, working in temperatures plunging below minus 73 degrees Celsius, have detected subtle temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation to produce the most detailed images of the early universe ever recorded.
CMB is the remnant radiation that escaped from the rapidly cooling universe about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
The instrument, known as an Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver (ACBAR), is part of the solar observatory at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
In a press statement, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) said this provides data to support the currently favoured model of the universe “in which 30 percent of all energy is a strange form of dark matter that doesn’t interact with light and 65 percent is in an even stranger form of dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.”
“Only the remaining five percent of the energy in the universe takes the form of familiar matter like that which makes up planets and stars.”
The new images produced by ACBAR also reveal the “seeds” that grew to form the largest structures seen in the universe today.
The South Pole data coincides with data produced by a Cosmic Background Investigator (CBI) based on a mountaintop in Chile that uses different instruments, observing strategies, analysis techniques, and sources of foreground emission.
“It is amazing how precisely our theories can explain the behaviour of the universe when we know so little about the dark matter and dark energy that comprise 95 percent of it,” ACBAR co-principal investigator William Holzapfel of the University of California at Berkeley said in the statement.
The dark energy inferred from the ACBAR observations may be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
“It is compelling that we find, in the ancient history of the universe, evidence for the same dark energy that supernova observations find more recently,” said Jeffrey Peterson of Carnegie Mellon University.
The devise is an array of 16 detectors that create images of the sky in three-millimetre wavelength bands near the peak in the brightness of the CMB.
ACBAR has just completed its second season of observations at the South Pole.
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is ideally suited for astronomy, especially observations of the CMB, due to the lack of water vapour in the thin atmosphere above the station.
“Our atmosphere may be essential to life on Earth,” said co-investigator John Ruhl, “but we’d love to get rid of it. For our observations, the South Pole is as close as you can get to space while having your feet planted firmly on the ground.”—AFP