There were four space probes to map the microwave background radiation of the Universe
Probe in 1984 (REALK1) Russian
Probe in 1989 (COBE) American
Probe in 2001 (WMAP) American
Probe in 2009 (PLANCK) Eupopean
All Probes obtained similar maps with the same anomaly, which showed an alignment of the Universe with the Earth.
COBE SPACE PROBE
The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE /ˈkoʊbi/ KOH-bee), also referred to as Explorer 66, was a NASA satellite dedicated to cosmology, which operated from 1989 to 1993. Its goals were to investigate the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB or CMBR) of the universe and provide measurements that would help shape our understanding of the cosmos.
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), originally known as the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP and Explorer 80), was a NASA spacecraft operating from 2001 to 2010 which measured temperature differences across the sky in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)
PLANCK (Named after Max Planck)
Planck was a space observatory operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) from 2009 to 2013. It was an ambitious project that aimed to map the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at microwave and infrared frequencies, with high sensitivity and angular resolution. The mission was highly successful and substantially improved upon observations made by the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
The following extracts are by Lawrence Krause from the Edge Magazine dated 7/5/06.
Lawrence Krause is one of the top cosmologists in the world. Lawrence was called on by the Ohio School System to represent them when they were attempting to stop the move to introduce Intelligent design into the Ohio School System in a court action. Part of Lawrence’s argument was that school students would not be able to obtain jobs in the science fields.
Lawrence Krause is an atheist.
Edge.org
Top of Form
Bottom of FormTHE ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO
A Talk With Lawrence M. Krauss [7.5.06]
“I invited a group of cosmologists, experimentalists, theorists, and particle physicists.
Stephen Hawking came. We had three Nobel laureates: Gerard 't Hooft, David Gross, Frank Wilczek; well-known cosmologists and physicists such as Jim Peebles at Princeton, Alan Guth at MIT, Kip Thorne at Caltech, Lisa Randall at Harvard; experimentalists, such as Barry Barish of LIGO, the gravitational wave observatory; we had observational cosmologists, people looking at the cosmic microwave background; we had Maria Spiropulu from CERN, who's working on the Large Hadron Collider—which, a decade ago, people wouldn't have thought it was a probe of gravity, but now due to recent work in the possibility of extra dimensions it might be.”----38 paragraphs---Last two paragraphs.---------
That is, we live in one universe, so we're a sample of one. With a sample of one, you have what is called a large sample variance. And maybe this just means we're lucky, that we just happen to live in a universe where the number's smaller than you'd predict. But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun.
Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic.
That would say we are truly the center of the universe.
The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales. And of course as a theorist I'm certainly hoping it's the latter, because I want theory to be wrong, not right, because if it's wrong there's still work left for the rest of us.
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The
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation signature presents a direct large-scale view of the universe that can be used to identify whether our position or movement has any particular significance. There has been much publicity about analysis of results from the
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and
Planck mission that show both expected and unexpected
anisotropies in the CMB.
[1] The results appear to run counter to expectations from the
Copernican Principle. The motion of the solar system, and the orientation of the plane of the
ecliptic are aligned with features of the microwave sky, which on conventional thinking are caused by structure at the edge of the observable universe.
[2][3]
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Scientific American: Is the Universe Out of Tune? [ COSMOLOGY ]
Like the discord of key instruments in a skillful orchestra quietly playing the wrong piece, mysterious discrepancies have arisen between theory and observations of the "music" of the cosmic microwave background.
Either the measurements are wrong or the universe is stranger than we thought.
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The Copernican principle has never been proven, and in the most general sense cannot be proven, but it is implicit in many modern theories of physics. Cosmological models are often derived with reference to the cosmological principle, slightly more general than the Copernican principle, and many tests of these models can be considered tests of the Copernican principle.[9]
The axis of evil
WHAT would you do if you found a mysterious and controversial pattern in the radiation left over from the big bang? In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London faced just such a conundrum. What they did next was a PR master stroke: they called their discovery the cosmic “
axis of evil“.
What exactly had they seen? Instead of finding hot and cold spots randomly spattered across the sky as they expected, the pair’s analysis showed that the spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) appeared to be aligned in one particular direction through space. (With the EARTH)
The apparent alignment is “evil” because it undermines what we thought we knew about the early universe.
Modern cosmology is built on the assumption that the universe is essentially the same in whichever direction we look. If the cosmic radiation has a preferred direction, that assumption may have to go – along with our best theories about cosmic history.