MAP time scale, courtesy Ken & Ali

[Boud Roukema]

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¶æ
Boud