This topic dips into Science and Technology, and, specifcially, a cosmological instrument that provides anistropic images of the universe. Yeah, not just the Milky Way: the universe
First, here are two useful sites. The first is a wiki article, and the second is the project mission description from NASA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkinson_Microwave_Anisotropy_Probehttp://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/To start, anistropy is a result you get from measuring things form different axes, or the opposite of finding the same thing in every direction. It's a physical property, but it has some other meanings. The wikipedia article on anistropy gives examples in various fields, including medicine and chemistry. A pretty good example of something that's anistropic would be liquid crystals, as in soap or an LCD display. Liquid crystals are pretty cool, because they are in-between materials: they take up different phases, and they're caught between being solid and liquid. Here's a description of those phases:
http://plc.cwru.edu/tutorial/enhanced/files/lc/phase/phase.htmBut that's not really significant. What's cool is that you can create a map of heat remaining from the Big Bang which displays a pretty sweet anistropic visual image of the universe. The imagery itself is pretty wild, but it also enables scientists to answer a lot of really big questions. The NASA site lists some of the accomplishments of WMAP in the link I gave, and here are 6 of the "top ten" NASA lists.
1. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has mapped the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation (the oldest light in the universe) and produced the first fine-resolution (0.2 degree) full-sky map of the microwave sky
2. WMAP definitively determined the age of the universe to be 13.73 billion years old to within 1% (0.12 billion years) -as recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records!
3. WMAP nailed down the curvature of space to within 1% of "flat" Euclidean, improving on the precision of previous award-winning measurements by over an order of magnitude
4. The CMB became the "premier baryometer" of the universe with WMAP's precision determination that ordinary atoms (also called baryons) make up only 4.6% of the universe (to within 0.1%)
5. WMAP's complete census of the universe finds that dark matter (not made up of atoms) make up 23.3% (to within 1.3%)
6. WMAP's accuracy and precision determined that dark energy makes up 72.1% of the universe (to within 1.5%), causing the expansion rate of the universe to speed up. - "Lingering doubts about the existence of dark energy and the composition of the universe dissolved when the WMAP satellite took the most detailed picture ever of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)." - Science Magazine 2003, "Breakthrough of the Year" article
My notes:
1. There's a project that will follow WMAP and improve this result, but it's a pretty sweet looking map. Given the size of the universe, that's not a bad resolution for mapping the microwave sky
2. That's pretty hot. Enough of that 12-15 billlion year crap from high school textbooks.
3. Significant, but not sexy imo. Included it so I could copy/paste the others
4. So we live in an unordinary universe? That explains all the spammers
5. This confirms a lot of suspicion about the make up of the universe and helps scientists figure out how the universe might end.
6. THIS belongs above #6. This could answer questions regarding whether the universe will end in a "Big Rip", a deep freeze, contraction or endless contraction, etc.. If there's a lot of dark energy, then it's possible that the universe will continue to expand indefinitely. Whether the result is a Big Rip or a kind of quiet freeze-out of everything may be understood in terms of how much dark energy there will be as the expansion continues, and also how it will be distributed
So basically WMAP confirms a lot of good science and it provides groundwork for some interesting future science. It's taken some things that were previously the domain of theoretical physics or even metaphysics and it's put them into pretty clear and astounding perspective. I'm not sure how many people are interested in deep field investigation or the cosmic microwave background radiation, but at the very least learning about this project might help people get interested in science or at least its sexy undertakings and answers to some of our big questions
It may not seem very important at first glance, but WMAP's project leaders an creators, or the people who use WMAP to do their work, stand a very good chance of raking in Nobel Prizes for years to come--or at least projects that will owe their existence to WMAP could rake in some prizes. This should pretty much explain why I think that's the case:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5401972.stmThis post was edited by RewtheBrave on Mar 23 2009 02:40pm