Cosmic background radiation - alternative proposal

[Nereid]

Alas, I cannot comply because of the many resources I don't have, the least of which are mental.

My intuition tells me that if dark matter exists, then CMBR might be caused by dark matter resonating due to

• energies impinging it (dark matter)
• energetic particles colliding with it

I find this proposal easier to accept, and simpler, than the universe having a beginning (or end).

Your intuition might be right

However, intuition is not science

Do you know of anyone who has made a proposal more or less in line with your intuition? Has such a paper been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal? Have you worked out the details of your proposal (e.g. how those resonations give rise to a 2.73K black body spectrum, with a 369 km/sec dipole in the observed direction)?

You know, I personally find quantum mechanics downright spooky ... but no one has yet come up with an experiment which contradicts it! So, spooky-to-me or not, that seems to be the way the universe works

 

[zforgetaboutit]

Your intuition might be right

However, intuition is not science

Do you know of anyone who has made a proposal more or less in line with your intuition? Has such a paper been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal? Have you worked out the details of your proposal (e.g. how those resonations give rise to a 2.73K black body spectrum, with a 369 km/sec dipole in the observed direction)?

You know, I personally find quantum mechanics downright spooky ... but no one has yet come up with an experiment which contradicts it! So, spooky-to-me or not, that seems to be the way the universe works

My motives are being misunderstood.

How about if you reconsider my postings as "Has anybody studied or proposed... (zforgetaboutit's musings)?"

When a prof suggests a research topic to the grad student, the grad student doesn't (usually) say "First you prove it then I'll consider it." or "That can't be right because nodbody else has published it."

Most of what I'm suggesting are directions in research for those who have the means to go down that road.

For no good reason one of the replies (not yours) was downright hostile.

 

[zforgetaboutit]

You know, I personally find quantum mechanics downright spooky ... but no one has yet come up with an experiment which contradicts it!

I'll be in that forum soon to ask about first principles of QED. Of all the explanations I've read to justify the first steps - they don't seem right to me. I'm missing too much formal background to go with the flow. I hope to improve my understanding in the other QED forum.

Some of you can hardly wait. :zzz:

 

[zforgetaboutit]

Pay particular attention to what absorption and emission process have been hypothesised and observed, and what the limits are to these.

I don't have enough fundamental background to judge their hypotheses, that ended up agreeing with their observations.

It would be so interesting for me to participate in recreations of all the classic experiments, discussing results, so I could better know the backgrounds of today's physics.

If I had the financial means I would gladly spend the rest of my life doing that.

 

[Nereid]

My motives are being misunderstood.

How about if you reconsider my postings as "Has anybody studied or proposed... (zforgetaboutit's musings)?"

When a prof suggests a research topic to the grad student, the grad student doesn't (usually) say "First you prove it then I'll consider it." or "That can't be right because nodbody else has published it."

Most of what I'm suggesting are directions in research for those who have the means to go down that road.

For no good reason one of the replies (not yours) was downright hostile.

I continue...

Oops, sorry!

Yes, I did misunderstand; the context of the sections here at PF has changed somewhat in the last month or so ... your good questions (if I may paraphrase, 'why is the CMBR considered to be a relict of the Big Bang? what foreground explanations have been ruled out and why?') deserve clear answers. If I may so however, sometimes I didn't fully understand some of those questions, rather interpreted some of them as "I've got an alternative proposal for the nature of the CMBR, it's {X}".

So, in a nutshell:
- AFAIK, no proposal other than that the CMBR is a highly redshifted 'image' of the surface of last scattering is consistent with the high quality observational data
- there are several well-understood foregrounds: the 'red tail' of thermal radiation from the solar system zodiacal light, 'free-free' emission, emission by (MW) galactic dust (both rotation - 'spinning' - and vibration), synchrotron emission, point sources (mostly beyond the MW), and the Suyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZE)
- there are also some 'cosmological' footprints that are not 'just' the surface of last scattering, e.g. gravitational lensing of the CMBR, the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, the Ostriker-Vishniac effect (aka 'the kinematic SZE'), and patchy re-ionisation
- AFAIK, all the 'well-understood' foregrounds have been unambiguously detected and well-characterised
- the Tegmark paper you provided a link to has a good discussion of each of these, as well as references to papers examining each in much more detail.

The SZE is a very interesting thing! I will do some digging to find what the status of the observational validation, in the microwave region. You will see there's an implication of the SZE for high energy cosmic rays - the inverse Compton scattering which give the microwave SZE footprint also produces high energy gammas (as also happens in supernova shockfronts) - in a few years' time (when CANGAROO and HESSI and VERITAS accumulate good data), and maybe after GLAST has been at work for a while, there should be independent data on the (distant) CMBR ... via UHE gammas!

 

[Nereid]

This set of slides from COBE give a nice overview of how COBE worked, how foregrounds were measured and subtracted (and what they were), what the dipole is, etc.

Note that the microKelvin fluctuations detected by COBE may not all be 'real' - at that level the researchers could only be sure that there *were* statistically significant fluctuations in the (dipole-removed) residuals, of approximately the size and nature predicted by the \LambdaCDM cosmological models. The later CMBR observations - MAXIMA, DASI, ACBAR, CBI, FIRS, BOOMERANG, WMAP - were of higher precision, so any particular fluctuation has now be clearly re-observed (usual caveats apply, e.g. angular resolution).