Pictures of the universe at age 380 000 years

Yesterday NASA published sharp pictures of the first moments of the cosmos taken by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, confirming the universe is 13.7 billion years old and is made up of just four percent atoms. The probe maintains a distant orbit about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

The probe’s goal was to establish a map of the universe, making precision measurements to one millionth of a Kelvin degree of infinitesimal fluctuations of temperature, known as anisotropy, observed in the universe about 400 000 years after the Big Bang. One of the biggest surprises is that the first stars in the universe were illuminated some 200 million years after the Big Bang – much earlier than first thought.

The Big Bang theory of cosmology holds that the expansion of the universe began with a gigantic explosion around 14 billion years ago of which a fossil trace, some 300 000 years later, still remains. At that time, the universe was filled with hot gas heated to 2725 degrees Kelvin (2541 degrees Celsius). The ensuing light is visible to us as microwave radio rays known as the cosmic microwave background, and which has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us, now captured by the WMAP over the past 12 months. (Source iafrica.com)