The Solar System’s ‘Axis of Evil’

Thousands of years ago, many early scientists believed that Earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around us. Technically, all the celestial bodies in the universe are actually scattered around us, but Earth is far from being the center of the universe.

We are currently using Copernican principle and cosmological principle to understand the reality around us — the cosmological method is an extension of the Copernican principle. Both claim that the Earth is not the center of the universe; in fact, the region we live in is considered only a ‘far corner’ of the universe.

If scientists found something that violated these principles, it would be a big problem because they play a fundamental role in various studies of stars.

In fact, it’s no longer a matter of “what ifs,” as astronomers have already found anomalies that suggest possible violations when observing data collected from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB represents radiation from the early universe, recorded about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

“The Copernican principle is the cornerstone of much astronomy, taken for granted, and plays a major role in many statistical tests of the validity of cosmological models. It is also a necessary consequence of the strongest assumption of the Cosmological Principle: In other words, we do not live in a special part of the universe, nor is there a special part of the universe. “Everything is the same everywhere (down to statistical variability),” Fermilab scientist Albert Stebbins told the website. Physical.

From cosmological principle, astronomers understand that the CMB should have nearly the same temperature in all directions, with some natural fluctuations. However, possible violations have been detected. Some studies have noted anomalous hot and cold spots aligned on an axis of the CMB called the ‘Axis of Evil’.

What is the ‘axis of evil’?

NASA’s COBE and WMAP missions took measurements and discovered: The average temperature of the CMB is about -270 degrees Celsius, by small natural fluctuations and by estimating by principles.

By analyzing the CMB at different angular scales, scientists can understand the distribution of temperatures in the cosmic background. These fluctuations should result in a random distribution of hot and cold regions without any alignment pattern. However, it was observed that the fluctuation patterns at larger scales corresponding to the quadrupole and octapolar regions of the CMB appeared aligned.

From there, This anomalous phenomenon has been called the ‘Axis of Evil’ but is still not fully understoodThe name is a reference to the expression adopted by former US President George W. Bush in 2002 for Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Cosmological anomaly

The first scientific paper on the subject was published in 2005, when the term ‘Axis of Evil’ was first used to describe the anomaly. According to astrophysicist Paul Sutter from Ohio State University (USA), during the first measurement of the phenomenon, Scientists believed that this might be a statistical error that would disappear in subsequent measurements. However, other observations continued to detect problems.

“Is this really a coincidence? A fortuitous alignment that our pattern-loving brains have conditioned us to find? Does it point seductively toward some new and revolutionary physics? Or perhaps we’ve messed up something in the measurements?” Sutter explains in an article on his website: space.

In any case, this phenomenon needs to be analyzed in more detail before scientists can understand whether it represents a potential challenge to the cosmological principle. Therefore, There is still no conclusion to explain the nature of the ‘Axis of Evil’, But maybe in the near future we will be able to answer this mystery.

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