How the dawn of time has a promising future in research

Europe's Planck satellite is gathering cosmic data that will revolutionise our understanding of the universePossibly the most daring piece of modern science is the attempt to predict the patterns that galaxies make in the sky. The bold starting point is a statement on what the universe was like at a time when the entire visible universe was compressed into something like the size of a beach ball. That idea takes some getting used to. For starters, the notion that the entire visible universe could even fit into something so small as a beach ball is little short of mind-blowing: there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the visible universe, our Milky Way being just one of them, and each galaxy typically contains several hundred billion stars. Squeezing all that into a beach ball is testament to the fact that the substantial matter of our everyday experience is, in fact, largely empty space.Once we have a prediction for how the beach ball universe looked, we can use the equations of physics to run the clock forward to the present day. By comparing with the astronomical observations, we can test the model … and it works: the way that galaxies clump together into large-scale structures is precisely as anticipated. By itself, that would be impressive enough, but there is another source of information that allows for a second test.The Earth is bathed in radio waves that were produced when the visible universe was around a thousand times smaller than it is today. At that time,...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Astronomy Satellites Research Higher education Physics Features The Observer European Space Agency Science Source Type: news