Has CMB really been detected?

Have you verified that this local attenuation has not been taken into account?

I do not know if they did, but it is certainly possible.

===

Although I'm pretty sure the BB is wrong, I'm also pretty sure that an error of this sort would have been caught by now. (Yes, even by trained scientists.) On this one issue I'm willing to give BB supporters the benefit of the doubt.


LB

Of course if you have/find evidence to the contrary I'll have to reconsider ...

???

I have not been able to verify that it was taken into account.
That is, of course, different than verifying that it was not.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by kcody</i>
<br />How can this [cosmic microwave] radiation be coming from outside the atmosphere without being attenuated by it on its way in?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It is severely attenuated by Earth's atmosphere. Early detections saw the "background" as little more than instrument noice. High-altitude balloon detectors saw more. But all modern measurements are made from space. -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by kcody</i>
<br />How can this [cosmic microwave] radiation be coming from outside the atmosphere without being attenuated by it on its way in?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It is severely attenuated by Earth's atmosphere. Early detections saw the "background" as little more than instrument noice. High-altitude balloon detectors saw more. But all modern measurements are made from space. -|Tom|-
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

It's the ground based detectors that I'm wondering about... should not that first detector have picked up a difference in signal strength between the horizon and the vertical?

Hawking's book seemed to say that there was no such difference detected. The BEAST experiment report seemed to cite a flat 5% attenuation factor.

If that microwave radiation was coming from something else, say particle collisions, then it might be affected by altitude.

All else aside, though, if this stuff is real, then it should have the same predictable and well understood behaviors as any other EM signal.

For the record, I'm not certain one way or another. I can't seem to find adequate documentation for either case... but the presence or absence of a strength change according to angle from the horizon would seem to confirm or refute the origin of the detected microwaves.

So, where's the authoritative record of facts?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by kcody</i>
<br />So, where's the authoritative record of facts? <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">History is written by the victors to suit themselves. I no longer have any confidence in it as a record of what happened.

But as for the microwave radiation itself, check out any of the spacecraft experiments sensitive to it, starting with COBE in the early 1990s. -|Tom|-