Oldest light in the universe
Credit: NASA
What you're looking at is an image of the infant Universe, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, as captured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The probe, launched in 2001, not only pinpointed the age of the universe (13.7 billion years old), but helped refine our understanding of how it developed.
This week, astronomers released five years of data colleced by WMAP in the form of seven papers submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. The major findings include new evidence that the early universe was permeated by a sea of cosmic neutrinoes - mysterious forms of energy in themselves - and that it took the first stars more than a half billion years to create a thin cosmic fog of electrons in the universe's earliest times.
Instruments on WMAP were able to discern patterns of microwave light, left over from the Big Bang, that revealed temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) differing by one-millionth of a degree Celsius.
Temperature fluctuations stem from density differences in the cosmic soup that formed soon after the Big Bang and became the seeds of galaxies and the stars around us today.
This image might not look like much, but when the WMAP's images were first unveiled, at a conference of astronomers several years ago, they stood up and applauded because it was such an exciting breakthrough.
WMAP is a $150 million project of a team led by Johns Hopkins astronomer Charles Bennett.
There's more on the work here.
