Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to The large-scale structure of the Universe

Our Universe may not score a goal any time soon...

...as it is apparently not shaped like a soccer ball:

Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0604616

From: Neil J. Cornish [view email]

Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 18:19:11 GMT (618kb)

Extending the WMAP Bound on the Size of the Universe

Authors: Joey Shapiro Key, Neil J. Cornish, David N. Spergel, Glenn D. Starkman

Comments: 9 pages, 16 figures

Clues to the shape of our Universe can be found by searching the CMB for matching circles of temperature patterns. A full sky search of the CMB, mapped extremely accurately by NASA's WMAP satellite, returned no detection of such matching circles and placed a lower bound on the size of the Universe at 24 Gpc. This lower bound can be extended by optimally filtering the WMAP power spectrum. More stringent bounds can be placed on specific candidate topologies by using a a combination statistic. We use optimal filtering and the combination statistic to rule out the infamous "soccer ball universe'' model.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0604616

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