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Whatever its nature, the inflationary model predicts that this primordial energy would have been unevenly distributed in space due to a kind of quantum noise that arose when the Universe was extremely small. How could pieces of the Universe that had never been in contact with each other have come to equilibrium at the very same temperature? This and other cosmological problems could be solved, however, if there had been a very short period immediately after the Big Bang where the Universe experienced an incredible burst of expansion called 'inflation.' For this inflation to have taken place, the Universe at the time of the Big Bang must have been filled with an unstable form of energy whose nature is not yet known. One problem that arose from the original COBE results, and that persists with the higher-resolution WMAP data, was that the Universe was too homogeneous. Hot spots show as red, cold spots as dark blue. WMAP's map of the temperature of the microwave background radiation shows tiny variations (of few microdegrees) in The 3K background.

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With instruments sensitive to temperature variations of a few millionths of a degree, and mapping the full sky over 9 wavelength bands, it measures the fluctuations of the temperature of the CMB with an accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits.

Planck is making the most accurate maps of the microwave background radiation yet. By combining this evidence with theoretical models of the Universe, scientists have concluded that the Universe is 'flat,' meaning that, on cosmological scales, the geometry of space satisfies the rules of Euclidean geometry (e.g., parallel lines never meet, the ratio of circle circumference to diameter is pi, etc).Ī third mission, Planck, led by the European Space Agency with significant participation from NASA, was. The picture shows a map of the sky, with hot regions in red and cooler regions in blue.

With greatly improved resolution compared to COBE, WMAP surveyed the entire sky, measuring temperature differences of the microwave radiation that is nearly uniformly distributed across the Universe. The second mission to examine the cosmic background radiation was the Wilkinson Microware Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Smoot of the University of California the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics. These spots are related to the gravitational field in the early Universe and form the seeds of the giant clusters of galaxies that stretch hundreds of millions of light years across the Universe. In 1992, the COBE team announced that they had mapped the primordial hot and cold spots in cosmic background radiation. The first of these was the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). NASA has launched two missions to study the cosmic background radiation, taking 'baby pictures' of the Universe only 400,000 years after it was born. Missions Study Cosmic Background Radiation

Those same photons - the afterglow of the Big Bang known as cosmic background radiation - can be observed today.

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But when the free electrons were absorbed to form neutral atoms, the Universe suddenly became transparent. Before this 'recombination' occurred, the Universe would have been opaque because the free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds. As it continued to cool, it would eventually reach the temperature where electrons combined with nuclei to form neutral atoms. Then, as time went on, we would see the Universe cool, the neutrons either decaying into protons and electrons or combining with protons to make deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen). One of the goals has long been to decide whether the Universe will expand forever, or whether it will someday stop, turn around, and collapse in a 'Big Crunch?' Background RadiationĪccording to the theories of physics, if we were to look at the Universe one second after the Big Bang, what we would see is a 10-billion degree (° K) sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons, and neutrinos. Today NASA spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope continue measuring the expansion of the Universe. The mathematical underpinnings of the Big Bang theory include Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity along with standard theories of fundamental particles. Astronomers combine mathematical models with observations to develop workable theories of how the Universe came to be.

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