There's a nice NASA animation based upon the WMAP image hee:
http://www.nasa.gov/HP_FLB_Feature_MAP_030211.html
Christopher
Richard Crisp wrote:
>http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/02/11/cosmic.portrait/
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>'Baby pic' shows cosmos 13 billion years ago
>Tuesday, February 11, 2003 Posted: 4:45 PM EST (2145 GMT)
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>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Our universe is about 13.7 billion years old, flat,
>composed almost entirely of matter and energy that scientists still don't
>completely understand -- and will continue to expand forever, according to a
>new "baby picture" of the early universe captured by a NASA satellite.
>
>Scientists from NASA and Princeton University Tuesday unveiled the first
>results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, of WMAP, terming them
>a revolutionary "turning point" in understanding how the universe formed and
>evolved.
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>"Every astronomer will remember when they first heard the results from
>WMAP," said Dr. John Bahcall of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
>"The announcement ... represents a rite of passage for cosmology from
>speculation to precision science."
>
>In June 2001, NASA launched the WMAP satellite, a joint project of the space
>agency and Princeton. The $145 million observatory has been orbiting about 1
>million miles above Earth, measuring microwave radiation that has traveled
>13 billion light years and was generated just 380,000 years after the Big
>Bang that scientists theorize started the universe.
>
>By measuring temperature variations in the microwaves, down to a millionth
>of a degree, scientists on the WMAP team were able to create a picture of
>the early universe, before galaxies and stars were even formed.
>
>With those findings, scientists were able to make the most precise
>calculations yet about the age and make-up of the universe, including:
>
>-- The universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago, give or take about 200
>million years.
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>-- Only about 4 percent of the universe is composed of atoms -- the
>"ordinary matter" making up the physical universe we know. About 23 percent
>is "cold, dark matter," about which scientists know little, and 73 percent
>is "exotic dark energy," about which they know even less.
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>The image from WMAP, bottom, is 35 times sharper than a similar cosmic
>portrait taken in 1992 by its predecesor, the Cosmic Background Explorer.
>-- The first stars were "turned on" within about 200 million years of the
>"big bang" -- much earlier than scientists had previously believed.
>
>-- The geometry of the universe is flat, and WMAP's measurements support an
>"inflation" model, which holds that the universe formed with the "big bang"
>and expanded rapidly over a short period of time, before slowing to the rate
>of expansion seen today.
>
>That expansion will continue, said Dr. Charles Bennett of NASA's Goddard
>Space Flight Center.
>
>"The universe will expand forever. It will not turn back on itself and
>collapse in a great crunch," he said.
>
>The data from WMAP fits with conclusions drawn from other investigations of
>the early universe, including observations by the Hubble telescope and the
>Cosmic Background Explorer, which was sent up a decade ago to study the
>universe's origins.
>
>The "baby picture" of the universe was made possible by discoveries in the
>1960s of faint, uniform radiation emanating from deep space and reaching
>Earth nearly 14 billion years after it was generated by the Big Bang. The
>radiation can be more accurately measured with satellites in distant space
>that it can on Earth.
>
>By measuring the temperature patterns of the radiation, scientists can map
>these "anisotropic" differences and compare them to what they would expect
>to find with various theories about the origins of the universe, a process
>NASA scientists compared to fingerprint analysis.
>
>Bahcall's analogy of the process: If the current universe is a 50-year-old
>man, what WMAP scientists have been able to do is accurately measure the his
>weight when he was just 12 hours old.
>
>NASA officials announced Tuesday that they had named the satellite for David
>Wilkinson, a Princeton cosmologist who worked on WMAP and died in September.
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