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Voyager Clue Points To Origin of the Axis of Evil
KentuckyFC writes "Cosmologists have been scratching their heads over the discovery of a pattern imprinted on the cosmic microwave background, the radiation left over from the Big Bang. This pattern, the so-called Axis of Evil, just shouldn't be there. Now an independent researcher from Canada says the pattern may be caused by the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space where there is a sharp change in pressure, temperature and density of ions in space. Known as the termination shock, astronomers had thought this boundary was spherical. But last year, data from the Voyager spacecraft which have crossed the boundary, showed it was asymmetric. The new thinking is that the termination shock acts like a giant lens, refracting light that passes through it. Any distortion of the lens ought to show up as a kind of imprinted pattern on an otherwise random image. But the real eye-opener is that as the shape of the termination shock changes (as the Solar Wind varies, for example), so too should the pattern in the microwave background. And there is tentative evidence that this is happening too (abstract)."
No, it just means there's an extra factor that influences the images Planck will make. We just need to find out what the influence is of this extra factor, and then delete that factor from the images Planck makes.
Planck can make the images now, and we can compensate for the Axis of Evil afterwards.
A lot of the effects that Planck is looking for are extremely subtle, weak signals. I'm not sure how signal and noise compare in this case, but if they're comparable we will have to hope that heliopause effects are predictable enough to be cancelled out. One of the major objectives of Planck is to look for remnant signals resulting from gravity waves shortly after the inflation phase, and this could be not just weak but a localised signal, so small scale features of the heliopause may matter in this case.