I have been interested in space for a long time. I recall that, when I was 5 or 6, I had a conversation with my uncle where I told him I either wanted to be a lawyer or an astronomer. From the choices I have made, my decision making skills are obviously suspect. But, I’ve been even more attuned to information about the Big Bang for the past year or so. At some point, Cole was a little agitated about something that had happened at school. He was under the impression that one of his teachers thought he wasn’t telling the truth when he talked about the Big Bang. As best I could piece together, one of his teachers was maybe trying to tell him that the Big Bang might not be accurate, presumably based on religious concerns. (Cole also came back at one point talking about how God had made every snowflake different.)
So, that’s the background noise in my head when I read about the Planck Observatory sending back information about radiation that first swept out across space just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Planck was launched by the European Space Agency last may and is about a million miles from Earth (about 4x more distant than the moon.)
The Planck observatory, launched in May, is surveying radiation that first swept out across space just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
The light holds details about the age, contents and evolution of the cosmos.
. . .
It is trying to make the finest-ever measurements of what has become known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).This is light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.
Before that time, scientists say, the Universe would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been “coupled” – the cosmos would have been opaque.
Researchers can detect temperature variations in this ancient heat energy that give them insights into the early structure of the Universe.
With Planck, they also hope to find firm evidence of “inflation”, the faster-than-light expansion that cosmologists believe the Universe experienced in its first, fleeting moments.
Theory predicts this event ought to be “imprinted” in the CMB and the detail should be retrievable with sufficiently sensitive instruments. Planck is designed to have that capability.
Its detectors, or bolometers, are the most sensitive ever flown in space, and operate at a staggering minus 273.05C – just a tenth of a degree above what scientists term “absolute zero”.
Looks like you’d better start saving up for Cole’s law school tuition.
I just read an excellent book about the history & science behind the Big Bang, simply called The Big Bang by Simon Singh. I highly recommend it as very readable by “laypersons” like me. Anyway, he notes that a lot of theologians and religious figures etc. (including the Pope) like(d) the Big Bang theory because it implies a single moment of “creation.”
Yes, the universe is a spectacular place and the science to explain and understand it is only beginning. Way cool pictures. I have always been a bit bothered though, since all of our observations and measurements and theories are based on what we think we see, but what we see is what was there so long ago that it is all different now, but in what way we will probably never know. It could have all ended by now and we will not know for another 12 billion years. And I am fascinated by what is beyond our little universe–what is out there, what existed and still exists 300 billion light years, or a trillion light years and beyond? We are limited in our comprehension that the universe is infinite, it has no top, bottom, or sides. As the movie men in suits (will smith) depicted, size and distance are only relative.