WMAP results — cosmology makes sense!

I’ll follow Mark’s suggestion and fill in a bit about the new WMAP results. The WMAP satellite has been measuring temperature anisotropies and polarization signals from the cosmic microwave background, and has finally finished analyzing the data collected in their second and third years of running. (For a brief explanation of what the microwave background is, see the cosmology primer.) I just got back from a nice discussion led by Hiranya Peiris, who is a member of the WMAP team, and I can quickly summarize the major points as I see them.

• Here is the power spectrum: amount of anisotropy as a function of angular scale (really multipole moment l), with large scales on the left and smaller scales on the right. The major difference between this and the first-year release is that several points that used to not really fit the theoretical curve are now, with more data and better analysis, in excellent agreement with the predictions of the conventional LambdaCDM model. That’s a universe that is spatially flat and made of baryons, cold dark matter, and dark energy.
• In particular, the octupole moment (l=3) is now in much better agreement than it used to be. The quadrupole moment (l=2), which is the largest scale on which you can make an observation (since a dipole anisotropy is inextricably mixed up with the Doppler effect from our motion through space), is still anomalously low.
• The best-fit universe has approximately 4% baryons, 22% dark matter, and 74% dark energy, once you combine WMAP with data from other sources. The matter density is a tiny bit low, although including other data from weak lensing surveys brings it up closer to 30% total. All in all, nice consistency with what we already thought.
• Perhaps the most intriguing result is that the scalar spectral index n is 0.95 +- 0.02. This tells you the amplitude of fluctuations as a function of scale; if n=1, the amplitude is the same on all scales. Slightly less than one means that there is slightly less power on smaller scales. The reason why this is intriguing is that, according to inflation, it’s quite likely that n is not exactly 1. Although we don’t have any strong competitors to inflation as a theory of initial conditions, the successful predictions of inflation have to date been somewhat “vanilla” — a flat universe, a flat perturbation spectrum. This expected deviation from perfect scale-free behavior is exactly what you would expect if inflation were true. The statistical significance isn’t what it could be quite yet, but it’s an encouraging sign.
• A bonus, as explained to me by Risa: lower power on small scales (as implied by n<1) helps explain some of the problems with galaxies on small scales. If the primordial power is less, you expect fewer satellites and lower concentrations, which is what we actually observe.
• You need some dark energy to fit the data, unless you think that the Hubble constant is 30 km/sec/Mpc (it’s really 72 +- 4) and the matter density parameter is 1.3 (it’s really 0.3). Yet more proof that dark energy is really there.
• The dark energy equation-of-state parameter w is a tiny bit greater than -1 with WMAP alone, but almost exactly -1 when other data are included. Still, the error bars are something like 0.1 at one sigma, so there is room for improvement there.
• One interesting result from the 1st-year data is that reionization — in which hydrogen becomes ionized when the first stars in the universe light up — was early, and the corresponding optical depth was large. It looks like this effect has lessened in the new data, but I’m not really an expert.
• A lot of work went into understanding the polarization signals, which are dominated by stuff in our galaxy. WMAP detects polarization from the CMB itself, but so far it’s the kind you would expect to see being induced by the perturbations in density. There is another kind of polarization (“B-mode” rather than “E-mode”) which would be induced by gravitational waves produced by inflation. This signal is not yet seen, but it’s not really a suprise; the B-mode polarization is expected to be very small, and a lot of effort is going into designing clever new experiments that may someday detect it. In the meantime, WMAP puts some limits on how big the B-modes can possibly be, which do provide some constraints on inflationary models.

Overall — our picture of the universe is hanging together. In 1998, when supernova studies first found evidence for the dark energy and the LambdaCDM model became the concordance cosmology, Science magazine declared it the “Breakthrough of the Year.” In 2003, when the first-year WMAP results verified that this model was on the right track, it was declared the breakthrough of the year again! Just because we hadn’t made a mistake the first time. I doubt that the third-year results will get this honor yet another time. But it’s nice to know that the overall paradigm is a comfortable fit to the universe we observe.

The reason why verifying a successful model is such a big deal is that the model itself — LambdaCDM with inflationary perturbations — is such an incredible extrapolation from everyday experience into the far reaches of space and time. When we’re talking about inflation, we’re dealing with the first 10^-35 seconds in the history of the universe. When we speak about dark matter and dark energy, we’re dealing with substances that are completely outside the very successful Standard Model of particle physics. These are dramatic ideas that need to be tested over and over again, and we’re going to keep looking for chinks in their armor until we’re satisfied beyond any reasonable doubt that we’re on the right track.

The next steps will involve both observations and better theories. Is n really less than 1? Is there any variation of n as a function of scale? Are there non-Gaussian features in the CMB? Is the dark energy varying? Are there tensor perturbations from gravitational waves produced during inflation? What caused inflation, and what are the dark matter and dark energy?

Stay tuned!

More discussion by Steinn Sigurðsson (and here), Phil Plait, Jacques Distler, CosmoCoffee. In the New York Times, Dennis Overbye invokes the name of my previous blog. More pithy quotes at Nature online and Sky & Telescope.