The cosmic microwave background (CMB) of the universe, as observed by the European Space Agency's Planck space probe. The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in the universe, imprinted on the sky when the universe was just 380,000 years old. Tiny temperature fluctuations correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of the stars and galaxies of today.
The Associated Press
PARIS -- New results from a look into the split
second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years
older than previously thought but the core concepts of the cosmos - how
it began, what it's made of and where it's going - seem to be on the
right track.
The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation,
which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable
expanse in a fraction of a second.
The Big Bang is the most comprehensive theory of the universe's
beginning. It says the visible portion of the universe was smaller than
an atom when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded
rapidly, much faster than the speed of light.
The European Space Agency's Planck space probe looked back at the
afterglow of the Big Bang, and those results have now added about 80
million years to the universe's age, putting it 13.81 billion years old.
The probe also found that the cosmos is expanding a bit slower than
originally thought, has a little less of that mysterious dark energy
than astronomers figured and a tad more normal matter. But scientists
say those are small changes in calculations about the cosmos, nothing
dramatic when dealing with numbers so massive.
"We've uncovered a fundamental truth of the universe," said George Esfthathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge who announced the Planck satellite mapping. "There's less stuff that we don't understand by a tiny amount."
The
$900 million Planck space telescope was launched in 2009. It has spent
15 1/2 months mapping the sky, examining light fossils and sound echoes
from the Big Bang by looking at the background radiation in the cosmos.
The device is expected to keep transmitting data until late 2013, when
it runs out of cooling fluid.
Officials at NASA, which also was part of the experiment, said this
provided a deeper understanding of the intricate history of the universe
and its complex composition.
Outside scientists said the result confirms on a universal scale what
the announcement earlier this month by a different European group
confirmed on a subatomic scale - that they had found the Higgs boson
particle which explains mass in the universe.
"What a wonderful triumph of the mathematical approach to describing
nature," said Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist who was not
part of the new research. "It's an amazing story of discovery."