Content about “

cosmic microwave background radiation

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How did the all the stars and galaxies end up where we see them today? The very first instance of the Universe's existence holds the answer.

In this podcast we talk to Blake Sherwin about a new map of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the stuff in the Universe.

On the fourteenth day of advent, we consider the night sky...which isn't actually black, but permeated by the faint afterglow of the Big Bang.

Cosmology has an ambitious goal: to understand the Universe in its entirety. Find out more here.

Taking apart the CMB picture using the maths of sound.

Some of the Universe's most important secrets are hidden in the shape of a beautiful undulating curve: the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave spectrum. This article explains how.

Find out all you need to know about the cosmic microwave background in this comprehensive overview.

To understand the why the cosmic microwave background tells us so much about the Universe, you first need to understand what created it: sound waves travelling through the early Universe.

The cosmic microwave background is the earliest light we can see in the Universe. So important is this baby picture of the Universe, it's been involved in two Nobel Prizes. Why?

Data from BICEP2 gathered in the South Pole reveals swirls in the CMB, the first image of gravitational waves and evidence for inflation.

Cosmologists gathered in the Netherlands last week to discuss a new view of the Universe. The Universe as seen by Planck was an international conference to discuss the recently released scientific results from the Planck satellite, including two particularly striking snapshots of the early Universe.

Some of the things I overheard at Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday conference did make me wonder whether I hadn't got the wrong building and stumbled in on a sci-fi convention. "The state of the multiverse". "The Universe is simple but strange". "The future for intelligent life is potentially infinite". And — excuse me — "the Big Bang was just the decay of our parent vacuum"?!