Remake of Fagundes & Wichoski (1987)

[Andrzej Marecki]

Paper: astro-ph/0304290
From: Stephen Weatherley <stephen.weatherley w imperial.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 20:02:03 GMT   (254kb)

Title: Ghosts of the Milky Way: a search for topology in new quasar catalogues
Authors: S.J. Weatherley (1), S.J. Warren (1), S.M. Croom (2), R.J. Smith (3),
  B.J. Boyle (2), T. Shanks (4), L. Millar (5), M.P. Baltovic (1) ((1) Imperial
  College London, (2) AAO, (3) Liverpool John Moores, (4) Durham, (5) Oxford)
Comments: MNRAS Letters, Accepted, 5 pages, 3 figures
\\
  We revisit the possibility that we inhabit a compact multi-connected flat, or
nearly-flat, Universe. Analysis of COBE data has shown that, for such a case,
the size of the fundamental domain must be a substantial fraction of the
horizon size. Nevertheless, there could be several copies of the Universe
within the horizon. If the Milky Way was once a quasar we might detect its
`ghost' images. Using new large quasar catalogues we repeat the search by
Fagundes & Wichoski for antipodal quasar pairs. By applying linear theory to
account for the peculiar velocity of the local group, we are able to narrow the
search radius to 134 arcsec. We find seven candidate antipodal quasar pairs
within this search radius. However, a similar number would be expected by
chance. We argue that, even with larger quasar catalogues, and more accurate
values of the cosmological parameters, it is unlikely to be possible to
identify putative ghost pairs unambiguously, because of the uncertainty of the
correction for peculiar motion of the Milky Way.
\\ ( http://de.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0304290 ,  254kb)
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At first sight it's rather a dicouraging result - see the last sentence 
above. :-( but...

Let's explore other approaches! :-)

-- 
Andrzej