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The Importance of Silk Damping in the Early Universe
This is damping that was first studied by Joe Selk, our recent podcast cast. Photons moving the speed of light want to smooth things out in regions where you're over dense and hotter. And so the photons damp the oscillations. This leads to a prediction for what you should see when you look at how much variation there is in temperature in the microwave background. When you look at larger scales up to about one degree on the sky, there should be more variation.