The new report out of the new analysis of WMAP data on the neutrino background has again produced a result consistent with the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.
As such, the cosmic microwave background provides an independent estimate of the number of neutrino “families” in nature: 4.4 ± 1.5. Despite having been inferred from a totally different cosmological epoch, this value agrees with constraints from Big-Bang nucleosynthesis, the first few minutes of the universe during which light nuclei were manufactured, and with precision measurements at particle accelerators which fix the number of families at three. The WMAP5 data also constrain the combined mass of all types of neutrino to be less than 0.61 eV.
“The discovery of the neutrino background tells us that our models are pretty much right,” says cosmologist Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford. “Stuff from particle physics that you’re not putting in by hand just drops out of them — that’s pretty cool if you ask me.”
Yes, very cool! :)
Zz.
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