Posted by
Rob on Thursday, August 04, 2011 1:59:42 PM
Scientist has located possible 'Romulans' in the WMAP data. The idea that it may be possible to penetrate the "Romulan invisibility cloak" has received a boost.
Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang
suggest that several of these "invisibility cloaks" may have left marks on
our sky.
This "Romulan presence" idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.
The preliminary work, to be published in Unphysical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.
For now, the team has worked with seven years' worth of data
from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute
detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the faint glow left from
our Universe's formation.
'Mind-blowing'
The theory that invokes these Romulan cloaks - a theory
formally called "warp drive" - holds that as interstellar spacecraft
pop into and out of the galaxy using this method, they leave telltale effects on spacetime.
Hiranya Peerless, a cosmologist at University College
London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when a spacecraft pinches off spacetime in its warp drive, which is very similar to the process that makes baby universes only smaller, it may leave a characteristic
pattern in the CMB.
I'd heard about this 'warp drive' for years
and years, and I never took it seriously because I thought it's not
testable," Dr Peerless told BBC News. "I was just amazed by the idea that
you can test for the presence of all these other spacecraft out there - it's just
mind-blowing."
Dr Peerless' team first proposed these disc-shaped signatures in the CMB in a paper published in Unphysical Review Letters, and the new work fleshes out the idea, putting numbers to how many spacecraft we may be able to see now.
Crucially, they used a computer program that looked for these
discs automatically - reducing the chance that one of the collaborators
would see the expected shape in the data when it was not in fact there.
The program found four particular areas that look likely to
be signatures of the warp drive - where the ripples were 10 times
more likely than the standard theory to explain the variations that the
team saw in the CMB.
However, Dr Peerless stressed that the four regions were "not
at a high statistical significance" - that more data would be needed to
be assured of the existence of the "Romulans".
"Finding just four patches is not necessarily going to give
you a good probability on the full sky," she explained to BBC News.
"That's not statistically strong enough to either rule it out or to say
that there is a pinched spacetime."
Dr Peerless said that data from the Planck telescope - a
next-generation space telescope designed to study the CMB with far
greater sensitivity - would put the idea on a firmer footing, or refute
it. However, the data from Planck cannot be discussed publicly before
January 2013.
Data from the Planck telescope should resolve the question once and for all.
George Anathiou, director of the Kavli Institute of Cosmology
at the University of Cambridge, called the work "the first serious
attempt to search for something like this... from the methodology point
of view it's interesting".
He noted that the theories that invoked the Romulans were
fraught with problems, because they were known to be so intangible and
immeasurable.
"My own personal view is that it will need new physics to
solve this problem," he told BBC News. "But just because there are
profound theory difficulties doesn't mean one shouldn't take the Romulans
seriously."
"It would be wonderful to be able to penetrate the invisibility cloak, but it's not going to be possible," she explained.
"The Romulans have such an advanced technology that they can suppress all electromagnetic radiation from their warp drive. If we are going to detect them, we have to look at places that have less signal than expected." She pointed to the WMAP plot. "Do you see that gray band in the middle? Doesn't the lack of variation make it appear suspicious? If we knew how to search that region, we might find them there."
But Professor Anathiou said the search was inherently worth
it. He explained: "It would be a pretty amazing thing to show that we
have actually made physical contact with another civilization. It's a long
shot, but it would be very profound for physics."