Dear friends, For copyright reasons I probably shouldn't post Ken & Ali's full article here, but here are a couple of paragraphs which are pretty important:
But how can we spot these circles? From 1989-93, NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mapped the microwave sky, and found that it's not a perfect 3 Kelvin everywhere - there are slight fluctuations in its temperature. Cornish, along with his collaborators David Spergel of Princeton University and Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, thinks that searching for patterns in these fluctuations may be the key to finding out the universe's shape.
The team hopes to trace out different temperature patterns along circles, and then find the same pattern along another circle elsewhere in the sky. Patterns of temperature around one circle should be identical to another, says Cornish. The precise pattern of circles will indicate the fundamental polyhedron's shape.
COBE's achievement in making the first map of the microwave sky was impressive. But the map wasn't quite detailed enough for pattern-spotting. NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), launched last year, will map the microwave sky in unprecedented detail, providing the data that Cornish, Spergel and Starkman need for their
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search. MAP will complete its first complete scan in March and then we can begin our analysis, says Spergel. We hope to have the results by the end of the year.
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Of course, it's quite possible that they'll make too many simplifying assumptions or that the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect (between us and the last scattering surface) or "foregrounds" will cause too much confusion and lead to a false exclusion (more likely than a false detection), so Planck might still have a chance.
But Archeops data would clearly be the best competitor for MAP: 25% of the sky is not that far off from 67% of the sky...
Cze�� Boud