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Articles: Devotion | In quest of infinity - 9
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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That was when the astronomers said, “Listen, let us study this CMB more carefully to check how uniform it really is.” So they built satellites, launched them, collected tons of data, patiently analysed them and finally discovered some thing very important. The CMB was not perfectly uniform; it was substantially uniform no doubt but it also had minute ripples.
It is repeated from QFI – 08.
We might say, “That’s nice but so what? And by the way, why spend so many millions for finding this? What’s the big deal?” Well, there was a big deal, and I told a bit of that story last time. Basically, these minute ripples revealed two important things: Firstly, it gave a strong hint about how galaxies came to be formed in an otherwise uniform Universe. Scientists said, “Oh yes, the Universe was uniform but here and there, there were ripples in the density; that was enough of a seed to trigger the formation of a galaxy in that neighbourhood.”
The second point about the discovery was that it gave a conformation to the inflation model of Guth, that I you introduced to. If you recall, the Guth model enabled one to understand how uniformity and fluctuations, though minute, coexisted. Guth said that when it was born, the Baby Universe was in fact quite non-uniform; however, one enormous burst of expansion, inflation as Guth called it, made most of the Universe almost uniform, leaving a bit of very tiny ups and downs here and there, and that was enough to drive the formation of galaxies. There were of course other fringe benefits from the discoveries of the COBE and WAMP satellites, that enabled a very fine and detailed study of the CMB; but we shall not go into that.
Just to remind you, inflation is something really mind-boggling. In about 10-30 seconds [which means 0.000 {30 zeros}1], the Universe doubled its size 100,000 times. It means the size increased 2x2x…. 100, 000 times! It is hard to imagine what such an expansion means. Imagine two dots that are just one ten-billionth of a metre apart. That is an incredibly small distance. After 33 doublings, the separation becomes about one meter. One metre might not appear very impressive, but hold on. After 75 doublings, the separation is greater than the size of the solar system. After 110 doublings, the separation is about the size of the Milky Way. And so on it goes; an unbelievable magnification!
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