Tuesday, December 02, 2014

The birth of the universe?


The European Space Agency has been active in studying the big bang and thinks they have made some progress recently. Since I can't comprehend much, if any, of this science, here are some excerpts from a NY Times article:
A map of a patch of sky showing the temperature and polarization of cosmic microwaves from the end of the Big Bang, as reflected by dust swirling in the magnetic field of the Milky Way.
The subject of Planck 2014, as the meeting is called, is a new baby picture — and all of the accompanying vital statistics — of the universe when it was 380,000 years old and space was as hot as the surface of the sun. The portrait taker was the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which spent three years surveying a haze of microwave radiation left over from the last moments of the Big Bang with a bevy of sensitive radio receivers.
Its microwave portrait reveals a universe 13.8 billion years old that is precisely mysterious, composed of 4.9 percent atomic matter, 26.6 percent mysterious dark matter that is not atomic, and 68.5 percent of even more mysterious dark energy, the glib name for whatever it is that seems to be blowing the universe apart.

1 comment:

R J Adams said...

Now what's not to understand about that? Apart, that is, from just about all of it.