Cosmologically complicating dust
Monday, April 20, 2015 - 06:20
in Astronomy & Space
The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, light was able to traverse space freely. That light, the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), comes to us from every direction in the sky uniformly ... or so it first seemed. In the last decades, astronomers discovered that the radiation actually has very faint ripples and bumps in it at a level of brightness of only a part in one hundred thousand – the seeds for future structures, like galaxies.