More research into CBR
Project: The Voyager update project

Cosmic Background Radiation is essentially a left over from the cooling of the universe. It originated 400,000 years after the big bang. This was the time of last scattering, which is when the universe had cooled enough that there wasn't enough energy to keep electrons and protons apart. So the universe went from being a plasma to consisting of helium and hydrogen and the areas the were more dense with these kept attracting more and more matter around them and formed the galaxies.

Our instrument of detecting CBR:

Horn Antenna:

COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) 1989

Cosmic Background Imager (in the Andes)
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WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ) 2001

The WMAP has recently mapped a large portion of the sky and found that there are ripples in the CBR. These ripples have been turned into sound clips.


Ways to use CBR as a beacon:

The CMB photons scatter off free charges such as electrons that are not bound in atoms. In an ionized universe, such electrons have been liberated from neutral atoms by ionizing (ultraviolet) radiation. Today these free charges are at sufficiently low density in most of the volume of the Universe that they do not measurably affect the CMB. However, if the IGM was ionized at very early times when the universe was still denser, then there are two main effects on the CMB:

1. Small scale anisotropies are erased (just as when looking at an object through fog, details of the object appear fuzzy).
2. The physics of how photons scatter off free electrons (Thomson scattering) induces polarization anisotropies on large angular scales. This large angle polarization is correlated with the large angle temperature perturbation.

So if we can ionize (removing charged particles such as electrons) parts of the CBR around us it will change the ripples (small scale anisotropies) in the areas around our galaxies

There have already been machines built that have been able to do massive scale ionization on earth. This was done in the hopes of being able to control the weather and is called atmospheric ionization.


We could attempt to do the same with a satellite the orbited each planet or the entire solar system. The scale of such a project would be immense, but completing such a project quickly does not seem like a priority. Not to mention as soon as it started we would be marking ourselves, even if it is unlikely that with only a small bit marked anything would notice.

Sun, Feb 3, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: lighthouse
Sent to project: The Voyager update project

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