Huh - if all you read was Wiki’s content “above the fold”, it would seem pretty conclusively debunked. But once you expand the actual evidence it’s far more mixed. There does not appear to be any consensus at all.
Yeah, in almost all observations / readings the axis is there. There's just no explanation for it, and most people shrug it off as a data inconsistency or error with the measurement. But this measurement / data is the same that we base the big bang theory upon. The CMB is actually the biggest proof for the big bang theory. And the axis of evil is starring us right in the eye.
That's why they call it like that, it's an unexplainable evil anomaly that challenges the scientific worldview. And that is also why scientists generally don't look at it or even want to talk about it. Because as a scientists you can't do much with it except being confused and weirded out.
I'm very curious if there will be new discoveries or theories that would explain it.
Reading into it a bit more, it seems like essentially the idea is you can take a sort of 2D Fourier Transform of the CMB, and the 4th and 8th terms of this series are generally aligned with the solar system’s axis.
It’s interesting, but not quite a slam dunk unless I’m missing something – across all the terms in the series, some of them would be sure to generally align with our axis right?
I'm not familiar with these techniques, but from what I understand there is a very small chance, like somewhere around 0.01 or lower, that this aligns so perfectly with the solar system. So it would be a bad explanation to say it is coincidental.
The first sattelite to make a map of the CMB was COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) in the early 90's. The Axis of Evil was first observed there, but it was expected to be a measurement error / problem with the instrumentsation, and that it would go away with the next sattelite.
Then in the 2000's with WMAP sattelite, the Axis of Evil was still there. Scientists were very confused, but still they thought there must be something wrong with the measurement and / or the interpretation of the data. So still the hope was that this might finally disappear with the next sattelite, Planck, in the 2010's.
But the Planck observations still had the Axis of Evil in them. And since Planck there hasn't been any major sattelite that measures the CMB.
