![]() ![]() At first, they thought the anomaly was due to pigeons trying to roost inside the antenna and their waste, but they cleaned up the mess and killed the pigeons and the anomaly persisted. This accidental discovery happened when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, were building a radio receiver in 1965 and picked up higher-than-expected temperatures, according to a NASA article. (Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration, CC BY-SA) This information helps astronomers determine the age of the universe. Related: Peering back to the Big Bang & early universeĪ map of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, taken by the ESA's Planck spacecraft, captured the oldest light in the universe. It was first predicted by Ralph Alpher and other scientists in 1948 but was found only by accident almost 20 years later. Sometimes called the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, this light is more properly known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This allowed light to finally shine through, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Over time, however, these free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms or atoms with equal positive and negative electric charges. "The free electrons would have caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds," NASA stated. This early "soup" would have been impossible to actually see because it couldn't hold visible light. The cosmos now contained a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons - the raw materials that would become the building blocks for everything that exists today. This all happened within just the first second after the universe began, when the temperature of everything was still insanely hot, at about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 billion Celsius), according to NASA. ![]() Hubble images show the far-distant galaxy GN-z11 as it appeared shortly after the Big Bang.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |