USATODAY.com – Big Bang unfolded in the blink of an eye
The lastest WMAP results are in, inflation theory seems to be a bit further comfirmed, but pretty much just a reinteration of what has been stated previously, which I still find exciting that we’re on to something.. even if its a very tiny something. And now a large snip of the article:
IIn its latest results, the WMAP team analyzed the polarization of that radiation, basically the amount of glare put off by the universe’s initial super-fast expansion. The glare observed by WMAP indicates how much room electrons had to bounce off each other in the early universe, providing a measure of scale for the infant cosmos.
“The observations are spectacular and the conclusions are stunning,” said physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University.
• The findings indicate that the universe is vastly larger than the sphere — 13.7 billion light years in radius — that can be observed from Earth.
• Normal matter, the stuff of people and planets, is only about 4% of the combined matter and energy in the universe. Dark matter, invisible and exotic physical particles, and dark energy, a gravity-defying force behind the continuing expansion of the universe, makes up the rest.
• Stars first appeared 400 million years after the universe’s origin, a bit later than the team’s 2003 estimate but still remarkably early.
“In our lifetime, our whole conception of the universe has changed,” says physicist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The next step for cosmic microwave researchers will be to observe gravitational waves in the early universe, the signature prediction of inflation that will be considered proof of that theory.
WMAP “is telling us that the universe is vastly bigger than we ever imagined — so big that we no longer have any reason to believe that our tiny patch of it is representative of the whole thing,”