Thursday, May 12, 2016

[yfgfmdip] Through the wormhole

In some hard science fiction, travelers from Earth pass through a wormhole, arriving at a new planet.  Over the course of the story, they try to figure out where they are, relative to Earth, how far they have traveled.  First they look at the sky with their eyes and notice the constellations aren't even remotely similar.  Later, they construct VLBI and notice that the pattern of distant quasars is also not similar.  They measure the cosmic microwave background and find that the temperature is about the same, so they haven't traveled (significantly) through time.  Later, they launch a satellite and measure the cosmic microwave background anisotropy, replicating WMAP, and discover...

I guess the moral of the story is that you should carry the WMAP anisotropy picture with you, just in case you ever need to confirm whether you've been abducted and dropped into an alternate universe.  The picture is a fingerprint of the universe.  Getting a tattoo mimics the map of the world in Waterworld.

The raw, prerendered, data for the image is at http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/dr5/ilc_map_get.cfm.

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