Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

Cosmic microwave background

A detailed discussion about cosmological models is in progress and it will be made available in future articles.
I considered Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) deserves a detailed discussion and an article by itself, as far only ESA and NASA have spent billions of Euro and/or Dollars and future researches are intended again with huge expenses.
It can be considered that CMB has been the most studied topic in the history of science … and also the most expensive one …

Background and actual explanation

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson working at Bell Labs discovered what is now called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB). They were interested to map radio signals from cosmos, i.e. Milky Way and possible other galaxies, but when they tuned their equipment to the microwave portion of the spectrum, they discovered an annoying background static noise. The noise was a uniform signal in the microwave range, with a wavelength of about 7.35 centimeters, and seemed to come from all directions. They attempted to filter out the signal, assuming that it was merely unwanted noise but no matter where they pointed the antenna, or when, the microwave static was the same. They spent months running down every possible cause for the static noise but they couldn’t find a source or a solution
Around the same time, Robert Dicke theorized that if the universe was created according to the Big Bang theory, a low-level background radiation at around 3 degrees Kelvin would exist throughout the universe.
Earlier, other physicists i.e. George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman published a detailed theoretical picture of the Big Bang theory. According to this model, Universe after the explosion was not only extremely dense but also extremely hot. At such high temperatures most of the contents of the universe was in the form of intense light (radiation) rather than in the form of matter and therefore this period is called the radiation era. As the universe expanded, the total amount of light and matter had to fill a continually increasing volume of space, so the density of both components had to decrease. In the same time with space expansion, it is considered a decrease in the wavelength of light traveling through took place. So the expansion of space caused the energy density of light to decrease even faster than the density of matter. Consequently, most of the energy of the universe was soon in the form of matter instead of radiation, and today we live in a matter-dominated universe. They also predicted that the radiant energy of the Big Bang must still exist in the universe today, although greatly reduced in intensity by the expansion of space. After their estimation, the present temperature corresponding to this energy would be 5 K, which is in the frequency band of microwaves. Looking back at the CMB we see the surface of "last scattering", when the photons last significantly interacted with the matter. At earlier times the universe is opaque, and so we don't see back further than the epoch of recombination. Between last scattering and today the universe is almost totally transparent. This means we are effectively seeing back in time to a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.
Subsequent observations of the microwave background at different wavelengths have refined the value of the radiation temperature coming from Universe to 2.73 K. This is about half the value calculated by Gamow et. al., but their result is widely regarded as a successful prediction in view of the approximations required by the calculation.
The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation led most astronomers to accept the Big Bang theory and this phenomena is the most conclusive (and certainly among the most carefully examined) piece of evidence for the Big Bang theory.
By the early 1980's it became clear that the CMB sky is hotter in one direction and cooler in the opposite direction, with the temperature difference being a few mK (or about 0.1% of the overall temperature). The pattern of this temperature variation on the sky is known as a "dipole", and is exactly what is expected if we are moving through the background radiation at high speed in the direction of the hot part. In the direction we are moving the wavelengths of the radiation are blue-shifted, making the sky appear hotter there, while in the opposite direction the wavelengths are stretched out, making the sky appear colder there. When this dipole pattern, due to Earth motion or other causes is removed, the CMB sky appears incredibly isotropic.
The highly isotropic nature of the cosmic background radiation indicates that the early stages of the Universe were almost completely uniform. This raises some problems for the big bang theory, most important being the horizon problem and isotropy.
First, when we look at the microwave background coming from widely separated parts of the sky it can be shown that these regions are too separated to have been able to communicate with each other even with signals traveling at light velocity. Thus, how did they know to have almost exactly the same temperature? This general problem is called the horizon problem. Second, the present Universe is homogenous and isotropic, but only on very large scales. For scales the size of superclusters and smaller the luminous matter in the universe is quite lumpy.
As consequence standard Big Bang theory does not account for all of the observed properties of the CMB, and the initial theory was amended with some more suppositions.
To resolve the horizon problem, astronomers introduced an inflationary period into the Big Bang model (blue curve in figure 1). This sudden increase in the rate of expansion of the Universe soon after the Big Bang, resolves not only the horizon problem, but also the flatness problem.
It is accepted that CMB has a temperature, spectrum and uniformity which is consistent with Big Bang cosmology and inflation, therefore, astronomers believe that by studying the properties of the CMB, they are in fact studying the conditions of the early Universe.

Figure 1. Amended Big Bang model with a inflationary period Credit: NASA/

Astronomers have sought progressively more detailed observations of the CMB, using balloons, planes and lately satellites to get above the Earth's atmosphere.
Three space missions in particular have been instrumental in measuring this radiation in finer and finer detail and with better and better precision.
In the late 1980's NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft having as main mission to study CMB properties outside Earth's atmosphere.
COBE established the precise blackbody (i.e. pure thermal radiation) character of the radiation (fig. 2) and measured the temperature as being 2.726 K .

Figure 2. Spectral distribution of CMB, CREDIT NASA/COBE

The fact that the spectrum of the radiation from figure 2 is almost exactly that of a "black body" implies that it could not have had another origin. In fact the CMB spectrum is considered a black body to better than 1% accuracy and this is much more accurate black body than any we can make in the laboratory. According to theoreticians, this radiation dates from about 380,000 years after the big bang, this means that the universe was in thermal equilibrium at that time.
As space expands, the initial wavelengths of the CMB expanded by the same factor. Wien's blackbody law says that the wavelength peak of the CMB spectrum is inversely proportional to the temperature of the CMB. Therefore, the drop in the CMB temperature by a factor of 1100 (= 3000 K/2.73 K) indicates an expansion of the universe by a factor of 1100 from the moment of decoupling until now.
COBE satellite was able to make still a ,,historic discovery” of ,,tiny fluctuations”, so-called 'cosmic ripples', in the temperature of the background radiation. These subtle temperature differences were vital because without them there would be no reason why matter would clump together. Instead it would be expected to be evenly distributed throughout the universe with no regions more dense or less dense than others. So this discovery was another strong piece of evidence supporting the Big Bang theory.
NASA's second generation space mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) was launched in 2001 to study these very small fluctuations in much more detail. The fluctuations were imprinted on the CMB at the moment where the photons and matter decoupled 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and reflect slightly higher and lower densities in the primordial Universe. These fluctuations were originated at an earlier epoch – immediately after the Big Bang – and would later grow, under the effect of gravity, giving rise to the large-scale structure (i.e. clusters and superclusters of galaxies) that we see around us today. These findings were rewarded with the award of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Mather and George Smoot.
In addition to measuring the temperature of the overall CMB, anisotropies in the CMB are capable of telling us the Earth's motion with respect to the CMB, the geometry (or curvature) of the universe, the baryon content of the universe, the dark matter and dark energy content of the universe, the value of the Hubble constant, whether inflation incurred in the early universe, and more.
By measuring the amount of the dipole anisotropy it was possible to determine the magnitude of the earth's motion with respect to the CMB: the earth is moving at a speed of 600 km/s in the direction of the constellation Virgo.
If the dipole contribution due to Earth's motion is now subtracted out, the temperature differences that remain are a composite of two things: a contribution from our galaxy and the true anisotropies in the CMB that were present at the moment of decoupling, hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy is bright at microwave wavelengths due to emission by molecules (particularly CO), dust, etc.
The anisotropies present at the moment of decoupling represent random noise present in the very early universe that was amplified by inflation to cosmic-sized scales and they account for how the large-scale structures that we see today (from galaxies to superclusters of galaxies) formed under the influence of gravity. After the Universe recombined, the stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies started to form. We know little in detail about this process, largely because it is a very complex physical process. One of the biggest uncertainties is understanding the "seeds" from which the galaxies and other structures grew. Everything that we see with optical telescopes (or telescopes in any other wavelength range) tells us about objects which have existed in the last 10 billion years or so. It becomes more and more difficult to probe conditions in the Universe at earlier times.
Detailed observations of the CMB provide exactly the sort of information required to attack most of the major cosmological puzzles of our day. By looking for small ripples in the temperature of the microwave sky we can learn about the seed fluctuations as they existed 300,000 years after the Big Bang, and well before galaxies had started to form. The universe must have been slightly lumpy to form galaxies and people later on from the internal gravity of the lumps. Gravity is symmetrical so it needed some initial density variations to provide some direction to where surrounding matter could be attracted. The slightly denser regions had more gravity and attracted more material to them while the expansion occurred. Over time, the denser regions got even denser and eventually formed galaxies about 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The slightly less dense places got even emptier as gravity increased the contrast between the denser places and less dense places see fig. 3.
WMAP had over 30 times greater resolution than the COBE satellite and this enabled us to predict the composition, geometry, and history of the universe, amount of matter in the universe and other parameters for the big bang model with a better accuracy. It is possible to predict how the Universe as a whole was: open or closed; what the dominant form of dark matter is; and how the Universe has been expanding since that time.
The latest topic in this field is the study of polarized microwave radiation. It is considered that at the end of ,,Dark Age”, with the formation of the first stars in the galaxies and the large black holes the universe was full of powerful ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light re-ionized the gas, freeing a lot of electrons. The light from the cosmic background would scatter off these newly freed electrons and become "polarized" so that the light waves tend to oscillate in a particular direction. How the light is polarized can tell you when the electrons were being freed again, i.e., when the stars first began to shine.
WMAP has detected the polarization of the microwave background and derived a time of about 400 million years after the Big Bang for the first stars. The visible light from these first stars will now have been redshifted into the infrared. The Hubble Space Telescope has detected near-infrared light from galaxies shining about 750 million years after the Big Bang in the "Hubble Ultra Deep Field" and the Spitzer Space Telescope may have spotted infrared light from early galaxies of about that time in other areas of the sky. One galaxy whose light was magnified by gravitational lensing by a foreground galaxy cluster appears to have formed a mere 200 million years after the Big Bang. However, it will take the much larger light-gathering power and resolution of the infrared James Webb Space Telescope to study these objects in detail .
The goal for the CMB researchers is to decompose the CMB diagram into its harmonic components and by interpreting the relative amounts of the harmonic components some paramters for the intrinsic properties of the universe were adjusted (such as the Hubble constant, the amount of dark matter, and the value of the cosmological constant, the age of the universe, and the amount of dark energy).
According to latest estimations here are the values for some cosmological parameters:
present age: 13.7 (+ 0.1) Gyr
geometry of the universe: consistent with flat:1.02+ 0.02
dark energy = 0.73
dark matter = 0.23
Baryons = 0.044 +0.004
neutrinos <0.0005
radiation = 0.0001
epoch of first star formation (end of the dark ages): 200 Myr after the Bang
moment of decoupling: 379,000 yr after the Bang
Hubble's constant = 71 (+3) km/s/Mpc

Figure 3. Universe evolution as result of temperature fluctuation of CMB (credit NASA)

Finally, ESA's Planck instrument was launched in 2009 to study the CMB in even greater detail than ever before. It covers a wider frequency range in more bands and at higher sensitivity than WMAP, making it possible to make a much more accurate separation of all of the components of the submillimetre and microwave wavelength sky, including many foreground sources such as the emission from our own Milky Way Galaxy. This thorough picture thus reveals the CMB and its tiny fluctuations in much greater detail and precision than previously achieved - as in fig.4. The aim of Planck is to use this greater sensitivity to prove the standard model of cosmology beyond doubt or, more enticingly, to search for deviations from the model which might reflect new physics beyond it.
Planck instrument is observing the Universe at wavelengths between 0.3 mm and 11.1 mm and instrument's detectors are so sensitive that temperature variations of a few millionths of a degree are distinguishable, providing greater insight to the nature of the density fluctuations present soon after the birth of the Universe.

Figure 4. CMB ,,seen” by different spatial mission

The most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation from the Big Bang — acquired by ESA’s Planck space telescope, has been released in 2013, revealing features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe and may require new physics.
The fluctuations in the CMB temperatures at large angular scales do not match those predicted by the standard model in physics — their signals are not as strong as expected from the smaller scale structure revealed by Planck.
An asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look.
A cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected.
Dark energy, a mysterious force thought to be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe, accounts for less than previously thought.
One way to explain the anomalies is to propose that the Universe is in fact not the same in all directions on a larger scale than we can observe. In this scenario, the photons of CMB may have taken a more complicated route through the Universe than previously understood, resulting in some of the unusual patterns observed today.
The Planck data also set a new value for the rate at which the Universe is expanding today, known as the Hubble constant. At 67.15 kilometers per second per megaparsec, this is significantly less than the current standard value in astronomy. The data imply that the age of the Universe is 13.82 billion years.

Why the actual explanation for CMB is absurd

Has someone ever tried to measure how much radio and microwave are emitted by a cooled body in laboratory conditions?
The cost of the experiment is about 1000 euro and it was performed quite a decade ago and already published on site and in a previous book .
In laboratory, a cut off experiment can be performed and it can be shown that a cooled body does not emit radio or microwaves.
http://pleistoros.com/index.php/en/books/corpuscular/thermodynamics-and-quanta-hypothesis

The results are completely negative on the entire interval of actual radio and microwave electromagnetic waves. At that time, I did not have detectors for terraherz radiation, but the rezult is the same even in this domain. By terraherz  radiation, I mean electromagnetic waves generated by electronic devices and not infrared or visible. During of a body's cooling, there is no emission of radio or micro waves and the comportment is similarly for a heated body from small temperature to high temperature. Experimentally, up to a certain temperature, the transfer of energy is made by conduction, convection or contact, and after that by radiation. This radiation is formed only from photons which fall in IR, VIS, UV, etc. depending on the temperature.
A variant of this experiment can be found here:
http://pleistoros.com/index.php/en/books/corpuscular/nmr-and-quanta-hypothesis

Has someone ever tried to measure how much radio and microwave are emitted by a cooled body in cosmic conditions?

In astronomy, the experiment can be replicated as a student task and it can be proven than other cosmic bodies do not fit to a black-body - it means at cooling do not emit radio and microwave. I have made the experiment for Moon more than a decade ago, but with actual devices even for Mercury the replicate of the experiment is a piece of cake. The experiment was intended to detect the shift of emission for Moon from IR toward radio and microwave in correlation with Sun illumination.
http://pleistoros.com/index.php/en/books/corpuscular/cosmic-body-temperature-and-quanta-hypothesis

For Mercury the link is available only in Romanian at this time ...
http://pleistoros.com/index.php/ro/carti/astrofizica/cuantele-in-astronomie

The conclusion is again astonishing and straightforward: a cooled cosmic body does not want to emit radio or microwave defying the black body model.
In order to avoid future meaningless and expensive experiment it is necessary to present some new concepts from the new theory of thermodynamics and of course the new theory of magneticity.

Postulate 1: It is impossible to produce electromagnetic waves (radio, microwaves, terrahertz wave) by any kind of thermodynamic experiments.

As consequence the observed cosmic microwave background radiation has nothing to do with a previous hot state of the universe and by sure this fact rule out the idea of an early big bang event. The actual accepted idea that interstellar and galactic medium with a temperature of 2,7 K, has a maximum emission in microwave radiation is a fake, and the discussion was already made in Relativity book published in 2009. With actual technique, it is very easy to cool down a body up to that temperature and to measure the microwave emission of such body, and of course the result will be negative.
I do not want to enter here in details because this topic will be treated as chapters in the thermodynamics and magneticity (former electromagnetism) books.

Postulate 2: It is impossible to have a thermal equilibrium between radio, microwave or terraherz radiation and matter.
For a common sense mind the postulate is straightforward: as soon the radio or microwave source stops to emit, the radiation disapiers immediatley. It is not important at what temperature the matter was arrived or other conditions. How  much microwave was released when you opened the door of an microwave oven when the source was shut down? You had to be careful to the infrared radiation emmited by the body inside microwave oven and not at microwave.....
Some cut off experiments will be described in the thermodynamic book beside a detailed description of this postulate.

Any further experiment related to CMB and thermal equilibrium of an early stage of Universe will be only a waste of resources............

On the other hand, if astronomers had been a bit more mindful with some simple data, by sure the the big bang model of Universe wouldn't have been accepted.
If we leave aside the up presented new information, solely on available information published in popularization books and leaflets about big bang model of Universe, a ,,common sense” mind will rule it out as internally inconsistent and contradictory.
Here are only few new paradoxes to be explained by big bang theoreticians....
I pointed out only a few because there is no need to spend another precious time on dead horses....

Paradox 1. Inflation and space expansion
It is accepted that space expansion does not take place in galaxies and clusters of galaxies, because gravitational force somehow restricts this space expansion.
If this is the situation, the ,,inflation period” who took place short after big bang is a complete non sense. The entire matter of the universe we see today, was at the time of inflation so crowded and confined in an minuscule space that gravitational force was by sure much higher as we see in this moment in galaxies and clusters of galaxies. In order to have such ,,inflation” working we have to suppose that gravitational force was not working during this period of inflation and this will lead to other absurdities.....

Paradox 2. Matter agglomerations and space expansion
Although one of the basic assumption of astronomy regards the uniformity and isotropy of Universe, the reality is a bit more complicate and even contrary....
Beside galaxies and clusters of galaxies which seems to defy the space expansion, in the last decade even more complex and large cosmic structures were discovered.
In 1989, Margaret Geller and John Huchra of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered the first large-scale structure of the universe. This structure, known as the Great Wall (more properly, the CfA2 Great Wall, named after the Center for Astrophysics), is a 500 million light-year's wide shell of galaxies just 16 million light years thick about 200 million light-years distant from Earth. The extent of this shell, which may be the boundary of a giant "bubble," might be larger, but our own galaxy prevents further observations.
A much larger wall, the Sloan Great Wall, named after the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, was discovered in 2003. This wall was observed to extend 1.38 billion light-years, which is nearly three times larger than the CfA2 Great Wall. For comparison, the diameter of the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years.

Fig. 5. A representation of the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, showing the Sloan Great Wall.

Nor is the Sloan Great Wall the last wall found. The farther we look, the more walls we find, the last being the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall, measuring more than ten billion light-years across, or more than 10% of the diameter of the observable universe. The discovery was made by mapping gamma ray bursts.
Data such as these suggest that the universe is far from homogeneous but also make the idea of big bang so artificial and absurd.....that even Baron of Munchhausen will be ashamed to use it as reference in his stories....
If organized matter ( galaxies, clusters of galaxies, walls of galaxies) has the ,,strange property " to block the space expansion, then some particular effects should be observed for microwave and even for light coming from long distances.
Let us suppose that in a spatial direction there are a lot of islands like our Milky Way or even bigger which do not expand as in first trigonometric quadrant from fig 6. In the third quadrant in another direction we have only few such islands.
In these condition Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation must has have a strong dependency with the direction where is coming from and in our example for the radiation in the first quadrant, the temperature of this radiation must be much higher. A photon in the first quadrant before arriving on Earth observer traveled a lot through non expandable space and this means his wavelength was less stretched out by comparison with a photon in the third quadrant. The difference of temperature between these photons should be much greater. We are not speaking of variations of few millionths of a Kelvin but we should expect a variation of at least few degrees and even decades of degrees.
Another problem which has to be solved regards the distance a CMB in first quadrant and a CMB in third quadrant traveled if they are measured as coming at the same moment of time to Earth observer. Of course, relativity admit that they traveled with constant speed c, but if the space was stretched out for one more than for another, it is impossible that both have departed from a sphere surface with Earth as center. As consequence, the horizon limit is not a sphere as in fig 6, and it must have a different shape. The situation is clearly explained in the third paradox.

Figure 6 ,,Formal horizon” for an Earth observer and temperature of CMB

Paradox 3 Expansion bubbles and Hubble Law
This is only the beginning of a nightmare for actual theoreticians. The existence of these islands inside observable universe without space expansion rule out the Hubble relation and it can be demonstrated that measured distances across Universe are meaningless and flawed.
Let us suppose that for a far away galaxy in the first quadrant we measure the same red shift like for another far away galaxy in quadrant 3. According to Hubble law, these galaxies should be at the same distance from Earth. But it is really this situation true in the field?
For the simplicity of calculation, let us suppose that photon in first quadrant traveled 30% of its path through islands without space expansion and the photon in the third quadrant only 5% of its path through such space. It means the first photon was red shifted for 70% of its path and the second for 95% of its path.
The Hubble constant is given by: H = v/d
where v is the galaxy's radial outward velocity, d is the galaxy's distance from Earth, and H is the current value of the Hubble constant.
Applying this relation for the photon in the first quadrant:
H = v/0.7x where x is the length of the path for the first photon
Applying this relation for the photon in the third quadrant:
H = v/0.95y where y is the length of the path for the second photon.
As far we have supposed that for an Earth observer both galaxies have the same redshift, they seems to have the same  radial outward velocity  v for both photons.
From these relations we can infer that:
v/0.7x = v/0.95y and this means: x =0.95x/0.7= 1.357y
Assuming that for y we have a value of 10 billions light years, it means for x we will have a value of 13.57 billion light years.
The consequences are dramatic for actual astronomy: a galaxy situated at 13.47 billions light years has the same red shift like a galaxy situated at 10 billions light years only because the photons coming from one galaxy travel through more non expanded space and the photons from the other travel less non expanded space.
Of course some solutions can be found to this problem: either we renounce to the Hubble law either we accept that expansion of space takes place only at the Universe border. Both solutions means we have to write again all we have accepted until today in astronomy ….
When a layman in a decade will read about this topic, s/he will remain astonished about the way people in 21 century were doing research.