Axis in the Universe

[Guest guest]

|| Om Gurave Namah ||

Dear Jyotishas,

While trying to research on Ayanamsha and related material I came

across an interesting material. The earlier notion that there is no

'Up' or 'Down' in space is being questioned by new found data that

light travelling in direction of approximately Leo to Aquarius is

modified differently than in any other direction. The orientation is

across the constellation Sextan (Near Leo/10Hrs) and Aquila (20Hrs).

 

 

In Jyotish we represent the Leo-Cancer side as South and Aq-Cp side as North.

 

Warm Regards

Sanjay P

 

 

http://www.rochester.edu/pr/releases/phys/borge.htm

 

http://www.spie.org/web/oer/june/jun97/axis.html

 

 

Axis gives universe orientation

 

 

 

 

 

Physicists at the University of Rochester and the University of Kansas have found evidence that space is not isotropic; measurements indicate that the universe has an orientation. The finding, determined by measuring the polarization of light as it travels to Earth from the far reaches of the universe, is the subject of a paper in the 21 April issue of Physical Review Letters.

" The big news is that perhaps not all space is equal, for as far back as we can peer in time, " says Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY).

Adds co-investigator John Ralston of the University of Kansas, " The shocking thing about our result is that there seems to be an absolute axis, a kind of cosmological north star that orients the universe. We don't really know yet what this axis represents. "

 

This newly discovered axis of orientation is not a physical entity but rather defines a direction of space that somehow determines how light travels through the universe. In effect, Nodland and Ralston have discovered a direction in space that is different from all other directions. The idea that any direction of space is in any way " special " has long been taboo.

" This work defies the notion that there is no 'up' nor 'down' in

space, " says Nodland, who is a research fellow at Rochester's Theory

Center for Optical Science and Engineering.

 

Nodland and Ralston, a professor of physics and astronomy at Kansas, say the axis might have several interpretations: It could be an intrinsic property of the universe, or it might indicate that an undiscovered particle, such as the long-theorized axion, is at work.

The team made the finding by studying the polarization of radio waves from 160 distant galaxies as measured in previous experiments by astronomers around the world. Nodland and Ralston found that the plane of polarization of the light rotates like a corkscrew as the light travels through space, and that the orientation of the universal axis that they've discovered is key to the amount of rotation. The rotation of polarization depends on the angle at which the light moves relative to the axis and on the distance the light travels before being measured.

 

Nodland summarizes the findings: In the cosmos, there are many galaxies that emit highly plane-polarized electromagnetic synchrotron radiation. In their journey through the cosmic expanse, these plane-polarized waves pass through intergalactic magnetic fields and charged particles, which rotate the polarization plane of the waves via the Faraday rotation effect.

During the past few years, John Ralston and I have studied data published by several independent research groups on the polarization of radio waves emitted by synchrotron galaxies. Surprisingly, we found that a wave's polarization plane undergoes an additional rotation that is very different from Faraday rotation. The startling thing is that the new rotation depends on the direction the wave moves through space, reminiscent of how a birefringent crystal changes the polarization of light passing through it in a way that depends on the direction the light travels through the crystal.

To be more specific, we found that the rate of rotation depends on the angle between the direction of travel of the wave and a fixed direction in space, pointing approximately toward the constellation Sextans from Earth. The more parallel the direction of travel of the wave is with this fixed direction, the greater the rotation. The amount of rotation is also proportional to the distance of travel of the wave. These are the only two dependencies of the rotation.

 

The curious effect is illustrated in figure 1. Earth is at the center, and the direction toward Sextans is represented by a red anisotropy axis. The axis extends from Earth toward Sextans in one direction, and toward the constellation Aquila in the opposite direction. A plane-polarized radio wave emitted by Galaxy A (green) travels toward Earth in a direction almost parallel to the anisotropy axis (red). On the other hand, a plane-polarized radio wave emitted by Galaxy B (blue) approaches Earth in a direction almost perpendicular to the anisotropy axis.

 

As the two waves propagate through space, their planes of polarization rotate, as shown by the green and blue helices. The distances of travel are the same for both waves, but the nearly parallel wave (green) has its polarization plane rotated more than the nearly perpendicular wave (blue). In general, we find that the rotation increases systematically as a wave's direction of travel approaches that of the fixed anisotropy direction. For illustrative purposes, the rotation effect in this diagram is exaggerated. The actual effect is extremely tiny, we find that one full revolution of the polarization plane is completed after the wave has voyaged for about a billion years.

 

 

Figure 2. Double anisotropy cone is positioned with its vertex at Earth, at the center of the figure, and opening up toward the constellation Sextans in one direction, and toward the constellation Aquila in the opposite direction. Our data consisted of 160 radio galaxies, shown as dots. The most distant galaxies in the data are about 7 billion light years away.

It is important to note that the anisotropy axis running through Aquila, Earth and Sextans, as shown in the figure, only represents a vector in space. Any other axispossibly vastly remote from Earth, Sextans, and Aquilaparallel to the anisotropy axis shown here, will suffice in defining the anisotropy vector. No particular location in space, like the location of Earth for example, is relevantonly directions are relevant. As in any analysis of experimental data, analysis of the synchrotron radiation data pinpointed only approximately the orientation of the anisotropy axis. We found that the data strongly indicated that the anisotropy axis lies within an anisotropy cone that has its vertex at Earth, its central axis pointing from Earth to Sextans, and its surface making a 20-degree angle with the central axis. The data provided no support for an anisotropy vector pointing anywhere outside this cone. In the opposite direction, from Earth to Aquila, the same axis is confined within a similar cone, so that the anisotropy cone is really a double cone.

 

In a curious way, the anisotropy direction reveals itself as that orientation of the needle of a cosmic compass along which electromagnetic radiation twists the most as it journeys through the fabric of space. What a coincidence, then, that the constellation Sextans stands for the sextant, the ancient navigational instrument by which seafarers would orient themselves. Aquila, by the way, is the messenger from Heaventhe mythological Eagle leading souls to immortality.

Since the new rotation we find has such a systematic directional dependence, it is implausible that it is generated by cosmic ions and fields via some mechanism similar to the Faraday effect, or other effect that depends on physical matter in the universe. One may therefore surmise that it is vacuum itself that flaunts a form of electromagnetic birefringence similar to the birefringence exhibited by many crystals.

One can show that the irreverent rotation can be generated by a coupling of the so-called electromagnetic field tensor to a new, four-dimensional vacuum field, whose spatial part is the anisotropy vector we discovered.

Furthermore, when subjected to coordinate transformations such as time-reversal and space inversion, this new field behaves in the same manner that the intrinsic spin of an atom or elementary particle does, when the atom or particle is subjected to such transformations. One may therefore affix some sort of spin to the new vacuum field. However, at this point, the question of what is truly underlying the effect we see is as wide open as space itself.

The team's work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and the Kansas Sci