Complexity Digest 2007.48 - 18

14-Dec-2007

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Astronomy: A Texture in the Sky?, Science Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: If confirmed, the identification of a cosmic texture in the sky will have provided us with good evidence that a phase transition in matter occurred at an energy of roughly 1016 GeV, many orders of magnitude higher than energy scales that can be reached in terrestrial experiments. The energy scale involved in the candidate texture is close to the elusive Planck scale, an energy where quantum gravity becomes important. A lesson to be learned from this work is that Planck-scale physics may well be testable in the very near future in cosmological observations.