Cosmic Signature

We've all seen lots of examples of pareidolia - misinterpreting random noise as significant patterns - and Phil has provided countless examples over the years. A new one was pointed out to me by a colleague just the other day. It is in this great image of the cosmic microwave background radiation as seen by WMAP.

Internal Linear Combination Map using 5 years of WMAP data. CREDIT: The WMAP team

Can you see it? I'll give you a clue. You are looking for the initials of one of the world's most famous physicists. He has been on the Simpsons, in Star Trek, and has even been a fictional hip-hop artist. I couldn't spot it until it was physically pointed out to me but now I can't help but see it every time I look at the map.

Part of the Internal Linear Combination Map using 5 years of WMAP data. CREDIT: The WMAP team.

If you're having trouble, here is a close up of the relevant part of the image. It is taken from a patch just to the left of centre in the Mollweide projection above. The initials S and H can be seen straddling the boundaries between Cygnus, Lyra, Hercules, Sagitta and Aquila.

Of course this doesn't mean that Stephen Hawking has graffitied the universe on a cosmic scale. They are just random temperature fluctuations in the cosmic background that happen to look vaguely like letters. To make matters worse, they have even less significance because they are very close to the plane of the Milky Way (which runs across the middle of the full sky map above) and this region of the map suffers from contamination by the galaxy.

It reminds me of a story I once heard about someone managing to write ELVIS into an interferometric image by cleaning the data in just the right (or wrong!) way.

Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Friday 20th Feb 2009 (02:52 GMT) | 8 Comments | Permalink

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Posted by Astronomy Link List on Friday 20th Feb 2009 (09:56 UTC)

Well I found a nice example on Galaxy Zoo when it first started up. A galactic advert for Channel 5: http://twitpic.com/16ok5 Oddly I didn't notice the prominent "5" for weeks after I'd been using it as a background picture on my phone!

Posted by Tim J on Friday 20th Feb 2009 (10:13 UTC)

Isn't the fluctuation of CMB from quantum effect? Why WMAP didn't remove the noise just like the signal coming from our Milkway.

Posted by eagle1879 on Friday 20th Feb 2009 (11:27 UTC)

@eagle1879 I'm not sure what you mean. It is the fluctuations in the CMB that are the interesting part that tells us about cosmology.

Posted by Stuart on Friday 20th Feb 2009 (12:46 UTC)

O, I am interesting how the fluctuation come from? Quantum effection?

Posted by eagle1879 on Friday 20th Feb 2009 (16:38 UTC)

It is thought that inflation stretched tiny quantum fluctuations in the early universe to cosmic scales. These fluctuations are in the CMB. Wayne Hu has an excellent tutorial about all this if you want to find out more.

Posted by Stuart on Friday 20th Feb 2009 (17:28 UTC)

That's fantastic! Good catch.

Oh wow, I SO want to see the "Elvis" example. I guess it's not *that* hard to force CLEAN to do something like that if you've got a really confused field...

Posted by Nicole on Saturday 21st Feb 2009 (18:24 UTC)

Hmmm... After several visits, I'm still having touble seeing SH's signature. I can see the S twice--a blue one and a much clearer yelow one--but I can't see the H anywhere. I think that to be convinced it was a sign of Stephen hawking's divinity I'd need to see it in a Times New Roman or Helvetica, clearly displayed.

Posted by Tim J on Monday 23rd Feb 2009 (18:06 UTC)

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Cosmic Signature

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