News

Definite Link to Big Bang Finally Found by Durham-Led Research

(31 January 2005)

A team of UK and Australian astronomers, after a 10 year research effort, have announced that they have found a direct link between modern galaxies and the Big Bang that created our Universe 14 thousand million years ago.

The 2dFGRS( 2-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey), a consortium of astronomers using the 3.8-m Anglo Australian Telescope, were trying to map the distribution in space of 220,000 galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

The missing link turned out to be the existence of subtle features in the galaxy distribution in the survey. Dr Shaun Cole of the University of Durham, who led the research explains, “At the moment of birth, the universe contained tiny irregularities, thought to have resulted from “quantum” or subatomic processes. These irregularities have been amplified by gravity ever since and eventually gave rise to the galaxies we see today.”

Even in the 1960’s theories believed that the primordial seeds of galaxies should be seen as ripples in the Cosmic Microwave Background( CMB), radiation emitted in the heat left over from the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 350,000 years old. These ripples were then seen in 1992 by NASA’s COBE satellite, but until now, no definite connection could be demonstrated.

The research showed that patterns could be seen in these ripples, which contain prominent spots produced by sound waves propagating in the unimaginably hot plasma of the Big Bang. These features are knows as ‘baryon wiggles.’

There have been theories speculating that the sound waves might have also left an imprint in the dominant component of the universe, ‘dark matter’. Physicists and astronomers started trying to identify these imprints in our own galactic neighbourhood. Professor Carlos Frenk, Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology of the University of Durham said, “These baryon features are the genetic fingerprint of our universe. They establish a direct evolutionary link to the Big Bang. Finding them is a milestone in our understanding of how the cosmos was formed.”