The universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago in a "Big Bang" that blew space up like a giant balloon. For nearly 400,000 years after that, the universe remained a seething-hot, opaque fog of plasma and energy.
But then, in an epoch known as recombination, the temperature dropped enough to allow the formation of electrically neutral atoms, turning the universe transparent. Photons began to travel freely, and the light we know as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) pervaded the heavens, filled with clues about the first few moments after creation. [Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps]
"As far as we know, that's as far [back] as we can see — we get an image of the universe as it was when it was about 389,000 years old," said John Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., senior project scientist for the space agency's James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Mather and George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite mission.
"We believe — although it's not 100 percent proven — that spots that we see in the microwave map from when the universe was 389,000 years old were actually imposed on it when [the universe] was sub-microseconds old," Mather told SPACE.com. "There's an interpretive step there, but it's probably right."
"We believe — although it's not 100 percent proven — that spots that we see in the microwave map from when the universe was 389,000 years old were actually imposed on it when [the universe] was sub-microseconds old," Mather told SPACE.com. "There's an interpretive step there, but it's probably right."
Most researchers think the "bang" portion of the Big Bang came during a dramatic and extremely brief period of inflation, which began about 10 to the minus 36 seconds — one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second — after the universe's birth.
During inflation, the theory goes, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light, doubling in size perhaps 100 times or more in just a few tiny fractions of a second. (Einstein's theory of special relativity holds that no information or matter can travel faster than light through space, but this rule does not apply to inflation, which was an expansion of space itself.)
"Inflation theory is the idea of going from spontaneous quantum fluctuations to something of macroscopic size," said WMAP principal investigator Charles Bennett, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. (The WMAP spacecraft, which launched in 2001, stopped gathering data in 2010.)
The precision mapping of the CMB performed by COBE, WMAP and Planck has provided strong support for inflation, helping cement its position as the leading explanation of the universe's first few moments.
"Why the cosmic microwave background temperature is the same at different spots in the sky would be a mystery if it was not for inflation saying, well, our whole sky came from this tiny region," Bennett told SPACE.com. "So the idea of inflation helps answer some of these mysteries, and it explains where these fluctuations came from."http://news.yahoo.com/incredible-technology-see-big-bang-153127374.html
