Cosmic cold spots now “even weirder”

The European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft discovered some odd things:

While Planck’s measurements in large part confirmed physicists’ understanding of the universe, some of the most interesting things Planck discovered were the unexpected details. For one, the universe seems divided into two hemispheres, one hot and one cold. And the hot hemisphere also contains a stark cold spot. Neither of these details were predicted, and shouldn’t in fact exist, according to the so-called standard cosmological model, which otherwise well describes the universe as viewed by Planck. The third surprise is the very slight way Planck’s measurements stray from the standard model, only at large scales. While earlier spacecraft had hinted at all these issues, Planck confirmed them for scientists, bringing into high resolution a problem many researchers had hoped would instead fade away with increased precision.

Korey Haynes, “The mystery of cosmic cold spots just got even weirder” at Astronomy

Researching the distribution of light following the Big Bang shows no evidence of these anomalies. Either they are flukes of statistics or evidence of new physics, the researchers say.

See also: Fifth state of matter may defy laws of thermodynamics, researchers say

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