What is it about?
The latest data release by the Planck mission strongly confirms a lack of large-angle correlations in the fluctuation spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. This argues against the basic inflationary paradigm, which instead predicts fluctuations on all scales within the horizon.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Any empirical evidence disfavoring inflation rekindles concerns about the long-standing horizon problem in the standard model of cosmology. Without inflation, the standard model cannot explain why we see the same microwave temperature on opposite sides of the sky. Inflation was invented to fix this serious problem. Without it, the standard model lacks internal self-consistency.
Perspectives
It may be possible to modify slow-roll inflation to incorporate a low-wavenumber cutoff in the spectrum, but that would require new physics. If such a modification cannot be made, then the whole inflationary paradigm is called into question and, with it, the long-term viability of the standard model of cosmology.
Professor Fulvio Melia
University of Arizona
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evidence of a truncated spectrum in the angular correlation function of the cosmic microwave background, Astronomy and Astrophysics, February 2018, EDP Sciences,
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201732181.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
