The Sputniks Orbit: We May Have Just Found Evidence of a Cosmic String: a 'Crease' in The Universe

Saturday, September 30, 2023

We May Have Just Found Evidence of a Cosmic String: a 'Crease' in The Universe

29 September 2023, By M. STARR

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-may-have-just-found-evidence-of-a-cosmic-string-a-crease-in-the-universe

A portion of the CSc-1 field, with galaxy paris indicated by white dots, and lines indicating the expected orientation of the strings.

(Safonova et al., arXiv, 2023)

A strange pair of galaxies several billion light-years away could be evidence of a hypothetical 'crease' in the Universe's fabric known as a cosmic string.

According to an analysis of the properties of the pair, the two galaxies may not be distinct objects, but a duplicate image caused by a trick of the light. And the reason the light is duplicated could be because of a scar in the space between us and the galaxy, creating a gravitational lens.

A paper describing this cosmic string candidate, led by Margarita Safonova of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has been accepted in the Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, and is available on preprint server arXiv.

Cosmic strings are like tiny, one-dimensional wrinkles or cracks through the fields of the Universe, thought to have been created at the very dawn of time as reality stretched and then froze into place.

These two blurry blobs could be evidence of cosmic strings.

(Safonova et al., arXiv, 2023)

These theoretical topological defects are estimated to be no wider than a proton, may extend the entire breadth of the Universe, and are thought to be incredibly dense and massive. Theory suggests that they may very well be real, but we haven't seen much physical evidence of them.

Cosmic strings are not easy to prove observationally. That's because the effects they have on the Universe can look a lot like effects that have other explanations. But there can be minute differences that point more to cosmic strings than those other explanations.

Safonova and her colleagues have identified not just one, but several, in a cosmic string candidate named CSc-1, identified in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the birth of the Universe. However, they focused their paper on the strongest cosmic string signature, a galaxy pair named SDSSJ110429.61+233150.3, or SDSSJ110429 for short.

SDSSJ110429 could just be a normal pair of galaxies. Another explanation when we see galaxies very close together, and looking similar, is that they are duplicate images, produced by a gravitational lens.