Evidence for a very large scale fractal structure in the universe from COBE measurements
Open Access
- 1 April 1995
- journal article
- Published by American Astronomical Society in The Astrophysical Journal
- Vol. 442, L45-L48
- https://doi.org/10.1086/187812
Abstract
In this work, we analyse the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation observed by COBE and show that the distribution can be fitted by a fractal distribution with a fractal dimension $ D= 1.43 pm 0.07 $. This value is in close agreement with the fractal dimension obtained by Coleman and Pietronero (1992) and Luo and Schramm (1992) from galaxy-galaxy and cluster-cluster correlations up to $ sim 100 h^{-1} Mpc$. The fact that the observed temperature fluctuations correspond to scales much larger than $ 100 h^{-1} Mpc$ and are signatures of the primordial density fluctuations at the recombination layer suggests that the structure of the matter at the early universe was already fractal and thus non-homogeneous on those scales. This result may have important consequences for the theoretical framework that describes the universe.