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NASA RELEASES STUNNING IMAGES OF OUR INFANT UNIVERSE
NASA today released the best "baby picture" of the Universe ever taken; the image contains such stunning detail that it may be one of the most important scientific results of recent years.
Scientists using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), during a sweeping 12-month observation of the entire sky, captured the new cosmic portrait, capturing the afterglow of the big bang, called the cosmic microwave background.
"We've captured the infant universe in sharp focus, and from this portrait we can now describe the universe with unprecedented accuracy," said Dr. Charles L. Bennett of the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt Md., and the WMAP Principal Investigator. "The data are solid, a real gold mine," he said.
One of the biggest surprises revealed in the data is the first generation of stars to shine in the universe first ignited only 200 million years after the big bang, much earlier than many scientists had expected.
In addition, the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a remarkably small one percent margin of error.
The WMAP team found that the big bang and Inflation theories continue to ring true. The contents of the universe include 4 percent atoms (ordinary matter), 23 percent of an unknown type of dark matter, and 73 percent of a mysterious dark energy. The new measurements even shed light on the nature of the dark energy, which acts as a sort of an anti-gravity.
"These numbers represent a milestone in how we view our universe," said Dr. Anne Kinney, NASA director for astronomy and physics. "This is a true turning point for cosmology."
The
light we see today, as the cosmic microwave background, has traveled over
13 billion years to reach us. Within this light are infinitesimal patterns
that mark the seeds of what
later grew into clusters of galaxies and the vast structure we see all
around us.
Patterns
in the big bang afterglow were frozen in place only 380,000 years after
the big bang, a number nailed down by this latest observation. These patterns
are tiny temperature
differences within this extraordinarily evenly dispersed microwave light
bathing the universe, which now averages a frigid 2.73 degrees above absolute
zero temperature. WMAP
resolves slight temperature fluctuations, which vary by only millionths
of a degree.
Theories about the evolution of the universe make specific predictions about the extent of these temperature patterns. Like a detective, the WMAP team compared the unique "fingerprint" of patterns imprinted on this ancient light with fingerprints predicted by various cosmic theories and found a match.
WMAP
will continue to observe the cosmic microwave background for an additional
three years, and its data will reveal new insights into the theory of
Inflation and the nature of the
dark energy.
"This is a beginning of a new stage in our study of the early universe," said WMAP team member Prof. David N. Spergel of Princeton University, N.J. "We can use this portrait not only to predict the properties of the nearby universe, but can also use it to understand the first moments of the big bang," he said.
WMAP is named in honor of David Wilkinson of Princeton University, a world-renown cosmologist and WMAP team member who died in September 2002.
Launched on June 30, 2001, WMAP maintains a distant orbit about the second Lagrange Point, or "L2," a million miles from Earth.
WMAP
is the result of a partnership between the GSFC and Princeton University.
Additional Science Team members are located at Brown University, Providence
R.I., the University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, the University of Chicago, and the
University of California, Los Angeles. WMAP is part of the Explorer program,
managed by GSFC.
For more information, including high-quality images, videos and press products, refer to:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2003/0206mapresults.html
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