By Ron Cowen
For a group of scientists who profess to love the symmetries in nature, cosmologists and astronomers spend an awful lot of time looking for and analyzing imbalances in the cosmic architecture.
A new study, reported in the Dec. 16 Physical Review Letters, seeks to explain why half of the sky appears to have larger deviations from the average temperature of the radiation in the cosmic microwave background, the remnant heat left over from the Big Bang, than the other half does.
The lopsided distribution in temperature may provide new insights about the earliest moments in the universe, when the cosmos underwent a brief but enormous growth spurt, expanding from subatomic scales to something the size of a soccer ball in just a tiny fraction of a second. It also suggests that the distribution of galaxies in the sky today — how closely they cluster — may exhibit subtle variations linked to differences in those early moments.