An anomaly in the temperature of the universe for a long time put physicists in a dead end, and a new analysis of the data from several radio telescopes only deepened the riddle about its cause.

This strange strip is observed in the echoing of the Big Bang – relict radiation (CMB), which has reached us from the beginning of time. Physicists agree that our view of the Universe, or our position in it, should not be something exceptional, so they expect that CMB should look approximately the same in all directions. However, the measurements show the opposite: there is a clear CMB transition from colder to hotter. This is called dipole, and a new study accepted for publication in Physical Review Lettersshowed how strange it is.

The CMB dipole itself is not surprising, but its degree of its severity does not correspond to our strongest cosmological models, explains physicist Lucas Boehme from the University of Bilefeld, the first author of the article. The radiation emitted by a moving source or measured by someone who moves-and the Earth, the solar system and our entire galaxy move-will shift towards the warmer or colder due to this movement, which is explained by the effect of the Doppler and other phenomena arising from the special theory of relativity. But the dipole, which researchers have observed for decades, corresponds to the movement about ten times faster than expected.

To better consider this discrepancy, Boehme and his colleagues analyzed the data of six radio telescopes. After a thorough analysis, they narrowed the data to three, which considered the most accurate ones, and analyzed it using a new model of distribution of radio sources in the sky. According to Boehme, their The approach is similar to the division of the sky into pixels and a scrupulous calculation of the number of radiation sources in each of them. Nevertheless, even with such a thorough adjustment, the riddle of the dipole is preserved.

It is the thoroughness of the analysis that makes it so interesting, appreciated by Professor Dragan Hutters from the University of Michigan. In his opinion, this is a significant step to establish a dipole as an indisputable fact of CMB observations. And this is important because then We will have to admit: either we do not understand something in the structure of our space environment, or the universe itself is not as homogeneous as the standard model claims. Hurter, however, admits that the measurements in radio -automonomy are sadly known for their complexity in achieving accuracy, so there may be systematic errors in the data.

Part of the complexity lies in the fact that all radio signals collected by telescopes are very weak, agreed Boehme.

“This is really a tiny effect that we want to measure. It is very difficult to calibrate our (radio) observation with such accuracy, ”he complained.

However, this is not the only proof of the dipole – infrared radiation from Quasars seems to confirm radio measurement. Nevertheless, the future telescopes will have to add more accuracy to the picture and resolve the riddle of the dipole, the physicist concluded.