Circles in the Sky: Finding Topology with the Microwave Background Radiation

Details Circles in the Sky: Finding Topology with the Microwave Background Radiation Circles in the Sky: Finding Topology with the Microwave Background Radiation

1998-01-22

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9801212v1

Class.Quant.Grav. 15 (1998) 2657-2670

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

14 pages, 10 figures, IOP format. This paper is a direct descendant of gr-qc/9602039. To appear in a special proceedings issue

Scientific paper

10.1088/0264-9381/15/9/013

If the universe is finite and smaller than the distance to the surface of last scatter, then the signature of the topology of the universe is writ large on the microwave background sky. We show that the microwave background will be identified at the intersections of the surface of last scattering as seen by different ``copies'' of the observer. Since the surface of last scattering is a two-sphere, these intersections will be circles, regardless of the background geometry or topology. We therefore propose a statistic that is sensitive to all small, locally homogeneous topologies. Here, small means that the distance to the surface of last scatter is smaller than the ``topology scale'' of the universe.

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