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Originally Posted by Jerry
I'm still trying to get my arms around this - To simplify.
As I understand the Hinshaw disclaimer; on the smallest scale, there is evidence of apparent structure, structure that they hoped to remove from the maps using filtering techniques, but they could not; and they do not understand the nature of this possible structure: There is evidence of contamination that we do not know how to handle.
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That may be so .. or it may not.
It's not so much that "
we do not know how to handle", as "this is as far as we have taken the work for now".
A key fact that seems to have been overlooked: the objective of the WMAP team's work is not,
pace just about everyone posting to this thread, Verschuur, Lieu, ..., is to report on their analyses of the WMAP (raw) data wrt the (CMB) angular power spectrum.
A somewhat lesser objective was to report on the low-
l data ... given that no other CMB investigations (other than COBE, and, in future, Planck) address this.
Anyone -
Jerry, Verschuur, Lieu,
dgruss23,
ngeo, ... - can take the raw data (published on the LAMBDA website) and do their own analyses, and publish the results of those analyses.
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Verschuur has identified possible local structure that has the potential to mask cosmological effects.
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IMHO, this is a misunderstanding, or mis-reading, of either Hinshaw et al., Verschuur, or both.
First, Hinshaw et al. entered a caveat ... which Verschuur chose to not mention. If nothing else, that caveat makes the starting point of Verschuur's logic chain weak ... surely everyone's efforts would be better spent addressing that weakness, rather than concentrating on speculation about what might - or might not - follow from it.
Second, Verschuur's conclusions were a lot less sweeping than your summary.
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I don't understand how/why the Hinshaw disclaimer addresses in any way the veracity of Verschuur's comparitive analysis. There is a possible correlation of bright colors in WMAP with rich clouds of H+ that were unknown at the time the data was first analysed. This has become an issue WMAP researchers must address. No?
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No.
First, the correlation isn't "
with rich clouds of H+ that were unknown at the time the data was first analysed"*.
Second, as I pointed out above, the relevant focus of the relevant WMAP researchers is the high-
l angular power spectrum. In this regard, if "
Verschuur's comparitive analysis" [sic] had legs, it would be relatively straight-forward to cite supporting data, from other (non-WMAP) observations of the CMB ... observations which do not have clearly stated caveats wrt angular scales < 10
o (you need pointers so such independent observations? just ask!).
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Shouldn't the burden of proof be upon the scientist who is saying they are looking through the fog and seeing very distant events, rather than on the scientist who says there is a big cloud right where you are looking - are you sure you can see through it?
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If that's what Hinshaw et al. were claiming, you may have a point.
However, it's not what the Hinshaw et al. (2006) paper is about ...
*
Please take the time to read the relevant literature; almost every part of your statement is factually incorrect.