Latest findings from the South Pole Telescope bolster standard cosmological model

Roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled just enough to allow photons to escape from the primordial cosmological soup. Over the next 14 billion years, these ancient photons—the universe’s first light—continued traveling. This relic light is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background.

In a new study, scientists used observational data of this first light—collected from the South Pole Telescope located at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica—to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the standard cosmological model that describes the history of the universe over the past 14 billion years.

The study was conducted by UC Davis researchers and colleagues in the South Pole Telescope collaboration, which is led by the University of Chicago, and has been submitted to the journal Physical Review D. It is currently available on the arXiv preprint server.

The study, based on high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background and its polarized light, adds further support to the veracity of the standard cosmological model. It also makes a calculation of the Hubble constant—how fast the universe is expanding—with a new method, offering new insight on an ongoing scientific puzzle known as “the Hubble tension.”

“We have a largely coherent, detailed, and successful model describing these 14 billion years of evolution,” said Lloyd Knox, the Michael and Ester Vaida Endowed Chair in Cosmology and Astrophysics at UC Davis and one of the study’s co-authors. “But we don’t know what actually generated the initial departures from complete homogeneity that eventually led to all the structures in the universe including ourselves.”

“This result is especially exciting, because it represents the first competitive constraints on cosmology using only the polarization of the CMB, making it almost 100% independent of previous results that relied mostly on the total intensity,” said study co-author and University of Chicago research professor Tom Crawford.

A polarizing and winding journey across the universe

In the study, the researchers analyzed two years of polarized light data collected by the South Pole Telescope in 2019 and 2020. The study’s observations cover 1,500 square degrees of sky and the collected data enabled the researchers to create a large-scale map of the mass in the universe.

Most natural light is unpolarized, composed of a random collection of light waves, each oscillating (waving up and down) with no preferred direction. But when light is reflected it can become polarized—meaning the light oscillates in a preferred direction.

This happens when sunlight reflects off water, or the ground, and is the reason polarized sunglasses can be so helpful for reducing glare. It also happened as the cosmic microwave background photons underwent their final scattering events in the primordial plasma as it began to disappear 14 billion years ago.

“The light from the cosmic microwave background is partially polarized,” Knox said. “We’re measuring at each location in our sky map the degree to which it’s polarized and the orientation of the polarization.”

After that last scattering, the slightly polarized light streamed across open space. Gravitational forces distort the paths of these light rays. Light from different regions is also distorted differently, resulting in a warped image—an effect called gravitational lensing.

To discover both what the polarized image would look like in the absence of gravitational lensing and also the map of the mass causing the gravitational lensing, the team used computers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley.

“What we essentially do at a really high level is we have this data and we send it over to this supercomputer at NERSC,” said Marius Millea, a project scientist with Knox’s research group and the study’s second author. “And the computers are testing this idea, “If this were how the real universe looked, would it produce a map that looks like what we saw?'”

“We have the data, but we also need to have a model that produces or predicts these kind of observables,” added Fei Ge, a graduate student with Knox’s research group and the study’s first author.

The Hubble tension

The team’s research directly addresses a conundrum in the cosmological community known as “the Hubble tension.” In essence, scientists can’t come to an agreement on the rate of the expansion of the universe, which varies depending on the methodology used to measure it.

In one method, astronomers use the standard cosmological model, combined with observations of the cosmic microwave background, to predict how rapidly the universe is expanding today.

In another method, they use observations of stars, and stellar explosions called supernovae, to measure the expansion rate more directly. Measurements from this method have generally come in higher—that is, a faster rate of expansion—than the standard model predictions. This is one of the major puzzles in contemporary cosmology; the origin of the discrepancy is unknown.

The team used their polarization data, combined with the standard cosmological model, to make a new prediction for the rate of expansion. Their prediction is consistent with the prediction made using the cosmic microwave background intensity maps measured by the Planck satellite, a European Space Agency mission.

The team’s new prediction is precise enough to be discrepant with the supernovae measurements at very high statistical significance. It aligns more with the rate of expansion predicted by the standard cosmological model and cosmic microwave background intensity method, and represents one more hoop that any solution to the Hubble tension will have to jump through.