Content about “

cosmic microwave background radiation

”

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.

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?

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"?!

What happens when one black hole meets another? Professor Kip Thorne shows us how to eavesdrop on these cosmic events by watching for telltale gravitational waves.