Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom.
Phys Rev Lett. 2012 Jun 15;108(24):241301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.241301. Epub 2012 Jun 12.
Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) contain information which has been pivotal in establishing the current cosmological model. These data can also be used to test well-motivated additions to this model, such as cosmic textures. Textures are a type of topological defect that can be produced during a cosmological phase transition in the early Universe, and which leave characteristic hot and cold spots in the CMB. We apply bayesian methods to carry out a rigorous test of the texture hypothesis, using full-sky data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. We conclude that current data do not warrant augmenting the standard cosmological model with textures. We rule out at 95% confidence models that predict more than 6 detectable cosmic textures on the full sky.
宇宙微波背景（CMB）的涨落包含了重要信息，这些信息对于建立当前的宇宙学模型起到了关键作用。这些数据还可用于检验该模型的合理扩展，如宇宙纹理。纹理是宇宙早期相变过程中产生的一种拓扑缺陷，会在 CMB 中留下特征性的冷热点。我们应用贝叶斯方法，利用威尔金森微波各向异性探测器的全天空数据，对纹理假说进行了严格的检验。我们的结论是，目前的数据不支持在标准宇宙学模型中加入纹理。我们以 95%的置信度排除了那些预测在全天空上可探测到超过 6 个纹理的模型。
