A blackbody photon density perturbation gives an intrinsic temperature fluctuation . The baryon/electron bulk velocity produces a Doppler effect at last scattering. In the common-potential convention of part (ii),
Ignoring the slowly varying damping derivative at leading acoustic order, differentiating the density cosine produces a velocity sine. Thus density and velocity acoustic sources are approximately a quarter cycle out of phase. For regular adiabatic initial conditions the density oscillation has approximately a common cosine phase across modes; this phase coherence is what makes a sequence of peaks instead of a smooth incoherent superposition.
Let be the comoving distance to last scattering and its sound horizon. In the present limit . Density extrema have , whereas velocity extrema have . The projection from spatial wavenumber to high angular multipoles is roughly , giving an acoustic spacing
The Doppler effect fills some density troughs and modifies the detailed peak shapes; its different projection prevents treating it as an identical second series of narrow peaks.
For clarity, choose the sightline to point outward from the observer and let its angle to have cosine . The intrinsic-plus-emitter-Doppler source is then . Expanding its angular dependence gives the angular projection of density and Doppler acoustic sources
The second sign follows from the chosen outward sightline and ; it changes with the sightline convention together with the velocity projection. The are Spherical Bessel functions. Both sources are proportional to the primordial curvature. If , their angular spectrum in the usual continuum Fourier normalization is
This formula includes the density-velocity cross term, not just a sum of independent source powers.
Photon diffusion multiplies both leading source amplitudes by , so their power carries . The approximate angular damping scale is
This produces the damping tail in the Cosmic microwave background power spectrum. Finite last-scattering thickness adds further small-scale averaging. Gravity, baryon loading and later propagation alter detailed peak locations and heights, but the oscillatory peak sequence, phase-shifted velocity contribution and diffusion damping follow directly from the simplified solution obtained here.