Big bang theory close
Space telescope images of universe near beginning of time show scientists’ accuracy
The Planck space telescope, an instrument scanning the sky for ancient light from the birth of the universe, released its first 15.5 months’ worth of data Thursday.
At first glance, even for an instrument examining cosmic artifacts from the beginning of time, the news highlights may strike those who aren’t astrophysicists as mundane.
We now know the universe is slightly older than we thought — 13.82 billion years old, or 100 million years older than expected. The constitution of the universe has been tweaked a little — there is a bit more dark matter kicking around and a bit less dark energy. But overall, the first findings from the $900-million Planck project showed with greater precision than ever before that the universe operates pretty much the way the standard model of cosmology predicted it would. So what?
That our best theories are fundamentally working is an astounding achievement, said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.
“We’ve been around doing science for a few hundred years, and we’re stretching our brains and our instruments back billions of years and we’re getting the right answer” — that is “kind of remarkable.”
Or as Dick Bond, a Canadian scientist involved in Planck, put it: “Planck is now the gold standard.”
Bond, the director of the Cosmology and Gravity program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, has been working toward Thursday’s release for nearly 20 years, from early predictions to Thursday’s massive data release — 28 papers’ worth.
Planck, a European Space Agency mission with significant contributions from U.S. and Canadian scientists, was launched in 2009 to provide the most accurate picture to date of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
CMB is the light that existed 380,000 years after the big bang, light that stretched out and became cooler as the universe expanded.
Equipped with sensors a fraction of a degree warmer than absolute zero, Planck scans the sky for tiny variations in temperature in the CMB. That light bends around matter, so it also helps provide a picture of the current universe’s makeup.
While Planck’s news on Thursday helped confirm with great accuracy theories about the birth and current content of the universe, there were still a few strange wrinkles.
“By making more and more accurate measurements, that’s actually when you start putting cracks into your model. And when you get a crack, that’s when you get a big step,” said Nigel Smith, director of SNOLAB, an observatory in Sudbury hunting for dark matter. “It’s an illustration of how science works, of how physics works, really.”