Why?
Type SLOWER!
why would that big bang go in TWO specific directions rather than all around evenly?
Unless whatever was smushed together to make the Big Bang wasn't symmetrical?
Right, that's just what I was thinking too!
So now, the authors don't say this in the article, but in
Cowboy Cosmology, the polarity of that radiation is consistent with this scenario:
Before our big bang, there were two other big bangs. (And probably lots of others, but the others don't matter right now.) Those 2 big bangs produced 2 "universes" very much like our own, with galaxies and stars and such. Just like our universe (which I define not as "everything there is" but as the product of our big bang), their universes did
not contain enough energy and mass to stop their expansion and collapse back into a ball, so they went on expanding out for what must have seemed like forever.
But eventually they came in contact with each other. A disk formed where they overlapped, and it was no big deal for a long time. But as they expanded, more and more material was flying in that direction (merely because it was expanding from the 2 previous big bangs) until it began to collect enough mass to collapse in on itself and form a black hole.
More and more mass and energy came toward the black hole until its own gravity began to pull from the other two universes. The pressure became so great that the nature of matter and energy changed from atoms as we know them (where electrons fly around protons with mostly empty space) so that there was no more space between the nuclei and the electrons.
This very very massive thing started pulling the two previous "universes" toward it until eventually it pulled enough material so that it crossed some threshhold of pressure and it asploded!
And the greater mass that was coming from the two opposite directions became the polarity in the WMAP that we can see above.