WMAP polarization data has had the odd characteristic of being aligned with the geometry of the solar system. If the CMB is purely cosmological, which is expected, the meaning of this continues to be unexpected and wanting for a reasonable correction or explanation. The authors try 4 possible sources of error and rule them out. This leaves it up to you, the reader. Surprise!
Note that their improved analysis is not close to the poles, but right over them in figure 1's color diagram.(see page 4 in the link) That's the 9 sigma result. They are suspecting some systematic error which is being overlooked here. SEE:http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...911.0150v1.pdf

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A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

And clink goes the Voyager probes off the glass globe with the nice painting of all the nearby stars, galaxies, etc., the Universe only being a few thousand AUs wide

Garbage in...windows 7 out?

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

I've always wondered how Microsoft does it.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

9 sigma results are hard to dismiss, right?

They also posit something within the Solar System may be at play. This seems unlikely.

Why not something like a galactic microwave corona stimiluated by a galactic bipolar flow from a magnetic pole 5.5 deg from the rotational pole?

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George. Yep. Six standard deviations is significant at the 99.9999998027 % level....~ 1 chance in a hundred million that it's random. That's good enough for a hanging in most countries., but it's greater than that.

__________________
A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

I don't see sigma values that much, amateur that I am, but those that I have seen were never this high. Six was about the most I've seen. I think Robert Kirshner (Harvard) claims you can bet your cat (or house ?) at 6. [I like your hangin' scale even better. ]

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George. Yep. Journal editors like to see ~ 3 for a paper...(Ap.J ).I'm a bigger gambler than Bob, and would bet at three. You've got to live dangerously a little, and....yep this is just a board.


It is interesting to note that iron is found in the remnant of supernova 1006, a type 1a remnant. SEE:http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007PThPS.169..150W Winkler. pete

There's strong iron in 1a"s, but at least some weak iron in type 2's. see:http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/tycho-s.htm, and we live inside at least one very old type 2, more likely, a cumulative bubble of about six of them from the Centaurus-Sco Association. How the sun's magnetosphere cannot be influencing the polarization of iron needles as we plow through that stuff, and causing what we are seing in the CMB remains a mystery to me. It is clear from the iron-60 in terrestrial marine sediments that we have bathed the solar system at least as deep as Earth's orbit in iron during the last several million years. (Fields) SEE:http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...xtinction.html

and SEE:http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0709/0709.4197.pdf

__________________
A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

Why is iron in a supernova remnant interesting?

Are you implying this as a possible anisotropy solution? Is iron a microwave emission source? Discovering entanglement supernova for both poles would be a nice career advancement for you... and that too is about a 9 sigma assesment.

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I hope I remember my freshman astronomy correctly-- but iron is usually found in supernova of larger stars--- not of the IA type-- Type IA is associated with stars of or --around the mass of the our Sun.

One governing prinicple of stars is their mass and therefore: possibly their ultimate fate-- IA types do nott have an iron core at the end of their lifetimes-- whereas our Sun will probably follow suit to a carbon core at the end of its lifecycle -- a type IA... then a black dwarf.. after it cools down.

Pure speculation: It is possible that there may be more than one supernova remnant here-- but I am not fully qualified to add authority to that notion.



The following link to wikipedia has some fairly basic answers to your question: Type IA

N.B.

Note to the mods & experts in the forum-- please excuse my oversimplifications.

The current model for Type Ia supernovae involves a carbon-oxygen white dwarf undergoing complete thermonuclear combustion. That means that the nuclei of the elements in the white dwarf (carbon and oxygen, for the most part) undergo a series of reactions until they reach iron-group nuclei.

Hence, a great deal of the material -- different explosion models predict up to 0.6 or 0.8 solar masses -- in the white dwarf is turned into iron-group elements.

You could look it up at ADS ....

Thank you for the correction.

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---Carl Sagan

George. The issue is the modeling of the mixture of elements and compounds that make up the expanding remnant. Type 2 remnants, rich in hydrogen, essentially have a reducing atmosphere, so growth of iron whiskers is possible without their being oxidized to Fe₂O₃ or some such compound. But the data indicates more iron, as Stupendous says in type 1a's. It's not entirely clearcut from what I've seen, there are some transitional types also. What would be interesting is to see some spectroscopic evidence of the Local Fluff, and the wall of the Local Bubble, indicating isotopic composition. Newer instrumentation always brings surprises. I'm not ready to toot a definitive point of view until I have more solid evidence.
It has been shown that the kinematics of an expanding remnant can generate microwaves, and that the energetics are order of magnitude from some of the radio data. What would enhance the view is isotopic sediment studies indicating whether a series of nearby supernovae were all type 1a's, all type 2's or a mixture of them , and in which sequence they occurred. That might point more assuredly to a Local component of the CMB that has not been cleared as a "foreground". We are only talking a small percentage of the entire signal causing the polarization effect. You can check out some of my older threads on CMB, Local Bubble, Star of Bethlehem, etc. I won't hijack or link them here. I think I laid a theoretical basis for a physical effect, and the work of Dr. Katherine Kielty on late phase evolution of supernovae indicates they can not only contain iron whiskers, but grains coated in carbon nanotubes. Both radiate pretty blackbody at low temperatures. pete

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A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

Intersting. Thanks for clarifying.

Since the result is bipolar, however, could it be that our galaxy is attenuating the microwaves, similar to our atmospheric air mass values increasing and causing greater extinctions as the observing angle increases toward the horizon. The size of the hot spots (fig. 5 of your OP link) and the temp. gradient seems to support this conjecture, or maybe not since I'm over my head in this thing.

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pghnative. Because iron, being a metal, is a good absorber of radiation when it is colder than the ambient surroundings, and emits pretty blackbody as it cools down in interstellar space when it is warmer than it's surroundings. Eli Dwek, one of the premier dust?ISM experts has shown that the spectra of some remnants are best fit by emission from iron needles. These, in a magnetic field will polar align, giving polarized emission. Dwek has also shown that at temperatures less than ~ 20 Kelvins, the radiation is predominantly in microwave. Eventually this should come to equilibrium at the approximate temperature of space....~2.725 K.

__________________
A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

I've read several papers by Dwek on properties of dust in SN remnants and I've not seen references to iron needles. Could you please provide a reference?

Stupendous. Try: http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=c...BFQKDlk5BO1aFA


and Ap. J 607:848-854, 2004, June 1....sorry can't link, school library computer has blocking software

__________________
A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

It looks like that paper talks about *extinction* from metallic needles, not emission.

Furthermore, he says in the abstract: "However, expelled into the intergalactic medium, their abundance is too low to cause any dimming of cosmological sources, and their length is too short to make them a significant source of submillimeter emission." But I'm not sure if you were implying that they had some connection to the CMB or not, so I apologize if I've made any incorrect assumptions.

Hmmmm....What if the sn debris were local?

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Sorry it's taken me awhile to start reading that paper. I intended to investigate this because a tight fit to the ecliptic would be earth-based, rather than solar system, so your comment seemed odd to me.

The 9 sigma result is the non-zero measure of the anisotropy, not its closeness to the poles of the ecliptic. (g = 0.29 ± 0.031, and 0.29/0.031 is 9.4)

From that Figure 1, they don't even look "right over" the poles, I'd estimate a couple degrees off or more. In fact, table 1 seems to say it's over 4 degrees, ± 4.

Now that I've had a look at it, I have some more questions, which I can't answer right now. The authors result is a re-work, which incorporates a "previously neglected factor" in the signal covariance matrix. They reference another work, so I'm not doubting them, but it is interesting that a change to the scaling produces a much stronger signal along the axis of the reference system. I'll have to look into it closer.

I've seen this sort of thing before.