Big Bang theory gets 3D boost and a wiggle
The Big Bang theory for the birth of the universe has been given credence by two new reports from astrophysicists in Australia and the US.
Matthew Colless, a fellow at Mt Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University (ANU), led the team which produced the first three-dimensional map of the universe. They were able to measure effects produced in the early universe by analysing the pattern made by galaxies in the map.
The report of their discovery of these acoustic oscillations was completed last year and published just two weeks ago.
These groundbreaking Australian results have now been confirmed by research from astrophysicists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maine who found similar evidence for acoustic oscillations in the matter distribution of the universe.
Christopher Miller from Carnegie Mellon, lead author of the report published in Science, said the evidence links the existence of acoustic oscillations - or wiggles - in the distribution of both the cosmic microwave background radiation and the distribution of matter throughout the universe.
Connection to the past
The detection of these oscillations provides scientists with a direct connection between the universe today and the universe as it was more than 10 billion years ago.
Miller and his team drew their data from three cosmological surveys to compare a current 'snapshot' to another 'snapshot', or data set, from the universe as it was only 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
"The agreement between the work of Professor Miller et al and ourselves is exceedingly good," Dr Colless told ABC Online.
"We now have confirmation of two measurements of today's universe and two experiments looking at CMB which are only 300,000 years after the Big Bang, and they all agree very well indeed."
"Our result is cleaner and slightly more accurate because we are using a single, specially designed survey. We were able to look at structure on a very wide range of scales. In order for the US team to do that, they had to look at three older sets of data to cover the same range," he said.
Map of the universe
Over the past four years the Australian team has been making an enormous map of 170,000 galaxies in the universe using the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Coonabarabran - the largest optical telescope in Australia.
The instrument they used to get such an enormous number galaxies is a unique piece of Australian engineering. The Two Degree Field spectograph, or 2dF, allowed them to look at 400 galaxies at the same time and split light from each galaxy into its spectrum and measure the redshift. Red Shift is a way of measuring distances to galaxies in the expanding universe.
Dr Colless said both sets of results show some aspects of how galaxies are formed and what happened shortly after the Big Bang.
"It looks as if this is confirmation of a pretty good theory of how structure grows in the universe from the Big Bang until the present," Dr Colless said.