WMAP RESULTS
Nancy Neal February 11, 2003
NASA Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-2369)
Bill Steigerwald
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-5017)
RELEASE: 03-064
NASA RELEASES STUNNING IMAGES OF OUR INFANT UNIVERSE
NASA today released the best "baby picture" of the Universe ever taken; the image contains such stunning detail that it may be one of the most important scientific results of recent years.
Scientists using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), during a sweeping 12-month observation of the entire sky, captured the new cosmic portrait, capturing the afterglow of the big bang, called the cosmic microwave background.
"We've captured the infant universe in sharp focus, and from this portrait we can now describe the universe with unprecedented accuracy," said Dr. Charles L. Bennett of the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt Md., and the WMAP Principal Investigator. "The data are solid, a real gold mine," he said.
One of the biggest surprises revealed in the data is the first generation of stars to shine in the universe first ignited only 200 million years after the big bang, much earlier than many scientists had expected.
In addition, the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a remarkably small one percent margin of error.
The WMAP team found that the big bang and Inflation theories continue to ring true. The contents of the universe include 4 percent atoms (ordinary matter), 23 percent of an unknown type of dark matter, and 73 percent of a mysterious dark energy. The new measurements even shed light on the nature of the dark energy, which acts as a sort of an anti-gravity.
"These numbers represent a milestone in how we view our universe," said Dr. Anne Kinney, NASA director for astronomy and physics. "This is a true turning point for cosmology."
The light we see today, as the cosmic microwave background, has traveled over 13 billion years to reach us. Within this light are infinitesimal patterns that mark the seeds of what later grew into clusters of galaxies and the vast structure we see all around us.
Patterns in the big bang afterglow were frozen in place only 380,000 years after the big bang, a number nailed down by this latest observation. These patterns are tiny temperature differences within this extraordinarily evenly dispersed microwave light bathing the universe, which now averages a frigid 2.73 degrees above absolute zero temperature. WMAP resolves slight temperature fluctuations, which vary by only millionths of a degree.
Theories about the evolution of the universe make specific predictions about the extent of these temperature patterns. Like a detective, the WMAP team compared the unique "fingerprint" of patterns imprinted on this ancient light with fingerprints predicted by various cosmic theories and found a match.
WMAP 1 Year Mission Results Press Release
So we have visable Hubble space telescope pictures going back around 10-13 billion years when the galaxies were smaller and different to how they have evolved and look today. The red shift learned in the late 20's by hubble and the wmap data and soon the Planck satellite data.
There was NO matter when the universe began. Some trillions of years in the future as the universe ages there will be a time when matter won't exist again.
So a "designer" designed a universe with entrophy and random events where matter would basically cease to exist in the future.
Did this "designer" "personally" guide a planet into a collision with earth to form our moon?
So this designer created a universe that just gets more chaotic with time?
"It is a matter of common experience, that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation can be elevated to the status of a law, the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics."
Some also still don't understand the weak anthropic principle.
Cosmology is just now starting to be able to ask the questions and look for evidence on what happened before the bang.
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These concordances between theory and observation are impressive, and have convinced cosmologists that the idea of a hot big-bang origin for the Universe is correct. But people still feel compelled to ask: what happened before the big bang? What actually caused it? Where did all the matter and energy come from?
Unfortunately, many popular accounts give a grossly misleading picture of the nature of the big bang. It is often depicted as the explosion of a compressed lump of matter in a pre-existing void. But no physical theory could explain why, after an infinite duration of emptiness and inactivity, a big bang should suddenly occur at some arbitrary moment in time.
In fact, it has been clear since the work of the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann in the 1920s that the big bang represents the origin of time itself - and, indeed, space. The big bang did not happen at a particular moment in time; it was the beginning of time. There was no epoch "before" the big bang for us to discuss."
This idea may seem baffling, but it is scarcely new. Already in the fifth century, St Augustine proclaimed that "the world was made with time and not in time". Augustine's proposal finds support from Albert Einstein. Before the theory of relativity, scientists thought of time and space as simply there. But Einstein showed that they are integral parts of the physical Universe, like matter. As with matter, time and space can be affected by physical processes; for example, they can be warped by gravitation.
Clearly, if time and space are part of the physical Universe, then any account of the origin of the Universe must include the origin of time and space too. This is easily said, but it is hard to envisage time and space coming into being from nothing. Consequently, when cosmologists say there was "nothing" before the big bang, people suspect verbal trickery, as if whatever it was that existed before is sneakily being called "nothing" to conceal ignorance.
However, that is not the sense in which the word nothing is being used. Stephen Hawking has remarked that the answer to the question "what lies north of the North Pole?" is also nothing. That doesn't mean there is a mysterious land called Nothing beyond the North Pole. It means the region concerned simply does not exist; it is not defined. The question is meaningless. In the same way, the question of what happened before the big bang is meaningless because it refers to a non-existent epoch.
Nevertheless, we are so steeped in the notion of cause and effect that we feel cheated when told that the Universe just popped into being, complete with its own space and time, like a rabbit from a cosmic magician's hat. Even if we are forbidden to ask what caused the big bang, in the usual sense of causation, we can still ask for an explanation. Why should a Universe come into existence in that manner?
Until a few years ago, scientists had no answer to this ultimate question. One simply had to accept, as a brute fact, that the Universe originated in a big bang. The job of the scientist was to describe the Universe after it had come into existence. The sudden "switching on" of time at the beginning was regarded as a singular occurrence about which science had nothing particularly useful to say. This hands-off state of affairs was transformed with the realisation that quantum physics provides a loophole to evade the normal strictures of cause and effect. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the micro-world of atoms and subatomic particles. The idea of applying quantum mechanics to the Universe as a whole therefore seems bizarre. However, if the Universe was once exceedingly compressed, there must have been a time when quantum effects were of cosmic importance."
Is the Universe a free lunch? - Arts & Entertainment - The Independent
I also wonder where this "diety" was when the early universe was 10 trillion degree's, was this "diety" in this plasma while designing?
It has been shown you can start a universe without a "diety." of course it hasn't been shown one way or another if there is a 'diety" or more then one "diety" even.
Most cosmologists nowadays don't believe this is the only universe and our searching for evidence.
