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Circles in the Sky: Finding Topology with the Microwave Background Radiation

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arxiv astro-ph/9801212 v1 pith:QRBH6HDY submitted 1998-01-22 astro-ph gr-qchep-th

classification astro-phgr-qchep-th
keywords backgroundlastsurfacetopologymicrowaveuniversecirclesdistance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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If the universe is finite and smaller than the distance to the surface of last scatter, then the signature of the topology of the universe is writ large on the microwave background sky. We show that the microwave background will be identified at the intersections of the surface of last scattering as seen by different ``copies'' of the observer. Since the surface of last scattering is a two-sphere, these intersections will be circles, regardless of the background geometry or topology. We therefore propose a statistic that is sensitive to all small, locally homogeneous topologies. Here, small means that the distance to the surface of last scatter is smaller than the ``topology scale'' of the universe.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Inflation and topology from the no-boundary state

    hep-th 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    The no-boundary wavefunction on the 3-torus, summed over SL(3,Z) geometries using GL(3) automorphic forms, favors large inflating universes with N ≳ 250 e-folds and induces torus-moduli corrections to the CMB spectrum.

  2. Gravitational waves and cosmic boundary

    gr-qc 2024-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    If the cosmos has a reflective boundary beyond redshift 15, gravitational waves from repeated black hole mergers could reveal it, with a TianQin+LISA network best at fixing the boundary's orientation.

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