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Fluctuations in the Primordial Fireball

Abstract

ONE of the overwhelming difficulties of realistic cosmological models is the inadequacy of Einstein's gravitational theory to explain the process of galaxy formation1–6. A means of evading this problem has been to postulate an initial spectrum of primordial fluctuations7. The interpretation of the recently discovered 3° K microwave background as being of cosmological origin8,9 implies that fluctuations may not condense out of the expanding universe until an epoch when matter and radiation have decoupled4, at a temperature TD of the order of 4,000° K. The question may then be posed: would fluctuations in the primordial fireball survive to an epoch when galaxy formation is possible ?

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SILK, J. Fluctuations in the Primordial Fireball. Nature 215, 1155–1156 (1967). https://doi.org/10.1038/2151155a0

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