News about "Big-Bang"

This reminds me of the first COBE picture, everyone tripping over themselves with adulation. You'll notice that only conclusions but not the assumptions used to reach the conclusions are reported. One positive thing, they've narrowed their age of the universe down to 13.7 billion years. Therefore if we find conclusive evidence for something being older it should finally dash the old theory away. Perhaps our resident astronomer TVF can give us the scoop on this picture?

Even if we find something older I doubt they will abandon the model. They will introduce a new ad-hoc parameter <img src=icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>. They would lose credibility if they publish that a new model completely different from the big-bag is necessary to explain better the observations.

The data itself is not presented, but is interpreted only with Big Bang premises, which makes it very difficult to evaluate.

In replacement cosmologies such as the Meta Model, the microwave radiation is the limiting temperature of space in any area due to the radiation of distant starlight. The latter predicts considerable irregularity, following the matter distribution. The Big Bang predicts little deviation from dipole radiation at that early epoch. To my eye (and I never judge much by press reports), the date looks pretty spotty.

More to the point, the map shown carefully avoids showing coordinates, so we cannot compare it to other maps. One wonders if the darkest area will correspond with the Virgo cluster, among other interesting possibilities. -|Tom|-