The sharpest baby pictures of the universe reveal their oldest light

It is difficult to present the universe in early childhood. Middle -aged space now extends into 93 billion light years, holding up to two trillion galaxies and more than 200 billion trillion stars. But at first things were simple. As a baby, the universe was essentially hot, dense particulate soup that expands and cools for billions of years. A telescope landed in northern Chile, peered into the early universe, capturing the consequences of the Big Bang that broadcast throughout the cosmos.

The Cosmological Telescope Atacama (ACT) released The most stressed images so far in the first light of the universe, capturing the material, which will later form the latest galaxies and stars during space early childhood. The new images, which will be presented at an upcoming meeting of the American physical society, date when the universe was only 380,000 years old. Space is already more than 13.8 billion years old, which means that the light had to travel more than 13 billion years to reach the telescope.

“When we look back at that time, when things were much simpler, we can bring the story of how our universe develops to the rich and complex place we find ourselves today,” said Joe Dunkley, Professor of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University and ACT leader for analysis, said statementS

This is the worst space time accessible to our viewing. This is because light would often be scattered by free electrons, making the universe opaque. Only 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the particles began to combine, allowing light to travel freely and end the cosmic dark centuries.

The cooled remnant of the first light that penetrates the universe is known as a cosmic microwave background – radiation of the leaves from the Big Bang that can still be found in the distant universe. This ancient light brings with it clues to the past of the universe, as well as its future, which allows astronomers to approach as close as possible to the Big Bang so that they can understand the birth and evolution of the cosmos.

After staring into the cosmic sky from a mountain in Chile for 15 years, ACT was able to measure the intensity and polarization of the first light of the universe with extreme sensitivity. This allowed scientists to appreciate the temperature, density and speed of the rotating material that occupied the baby universe, measuring how many of it was there before it began to form galaxies and stars.

The polarization of the material reveals the detailed movement of hydrogen and helium during cosmic early childhood. “We see the first steps towards making the most stars and galaxies,” said Susan Stags, ACT director and a professor of physics at Princeton University. “And we not only see light and dark, we see the polarization of high resolution light … such as the use of tides to conclude the presence of the moon, the movement traced from the polarization of light, tells us how much gravity was pulling in different parts of space.”

Images help scientists collect clues to the history of the origin of the universe. By considering ACT’s measurements, the team behind the study was able to confirm the age of the universe to 13.8 billion years, with uncertainty of only 0.1%. “The more than the young universe should be expanded faster in order to reach its current size and the images we measure, it seems that they will reach us from a closer,” Mark Devlin, a professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania and the deputy director of the ACT, said in a statement.

The team also managed to measure more precisely that the universe extends to about 50 billion light years in all directions away from us and contains as much mass as 1900 Zeta-Son, or the equivalent of almost two trillion trillion sun.

Instead of inventing new theories, measurements confirm that this is a business as usual for our surrounding space. “Our standard cosmology model has just undergone its most strength set of tests. The results are inside and looks very healthy,” says David Spergel, a professor of astronomy at Princeton University. “We tested it for new physics in many different ways and we do not see evidence of innovations.”