Submitted by _bidooflr_ t3_11isl13 in askscience
fizzbish t1_jb1rjan wrote
Reply to comment by Aseyhe in Does the age of the universe depends on where you are? by _bidooflr_
Thanks for this response. But I've always been confused about the CMB frame of reference. Isn't the CMB moving at the speed of light as microwave radiation? How is it the "rest frame" that is always used? Wouldn't its frame be the same as that of a random photon from a star?
bluesam3 t1_jb1v0ev wrote
It's something of a misnomer: it's not the rest frame of the radiation itself, but the rest frame in which the CMB appears the same in all directions: in most rest frames, you'll see it redshifted in one direction, and blueshifted in the other (this is what this looks like for us, for example: the overall hot/cold spots (NB: on this diagram, red is blue-shifted and blue is red-shifted, because humans like red to be hot, even though blue is hotter) are due to our velocity reshifting it, the funky lumps are local effects. If you adjust that to account for shifting the velocity of the observer, you can get it to the point at which that looks almost exactly flat (this famous image scales up the differences by orders of magnitude in comparison to the previous one - actual differences are on the order of one part in 100,000). The reference frame where that image is flattest (modulo a few adjustments for local effects) is the CMB reference frame.
fizzbish t1_jb63gbx wrote
Thanks this clears it up a whole lot for me!
Aseyhe t1_jb1txf9 wrote
An individual photon doesn't have a rest frame, but the CMB rest frame is the center-of-momentum frame of a collection of photons. Since the photons have all different momenta, their center of momentum doesn't move at the speed of light.
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