Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy blog reports on a five-year analysis of the cooling remnants of the Big Bang from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
And it’s cool. Phil reminds us:
The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.
(Zero degrees Kelvin is -273 degrees Celsius. [See science basics: absolute zero.])
The universe is 13.73 billion years old, plus or minus 0.12 billion.
Phil links to Cosmology 101, which explains what we mean by, “The Universe is flat.” Basically, it’s unlikely to collapse back in on itself.
Finally, the universe is mostly dark:
the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.
That’s the overview. Visit Phil for the explanation.
Thursday, 6 March 2008 at 22:52
Wow! What is all that dark stuff? I can’t help thinking that the universe is stranger than any of us can even imagine. I think the only reason that it exists at all is that it would be even more improbable that there would be nothing.