Cosmic microwave background wmap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkinson_Microwave_Anisotropy_Probe

Very interesting but now if you fellas could reduce the q to language suitable for your Average Clod (me), then maybe we could actually participate

When you go to the link I provided (you did click on it, right?), it gives more explanation on the subject. I don't claim to understand it all or even most of it. My role is to facilitate by providing an informative link.

Perhaps Linax13 can provide some better explanation?

Yea Rag of course. However it was 'way 'bove my head

The microwave background radiation is not from the instant of the Big Bang, but from a time roughly 300,000 years after the Big Bang.

"The place that emanated the light that we are detecting" was a good distance away from us when that light was emanated.

The universe being truly infinite, it doesn't matter how far away you need to go in order to have light take a given amount of time to reach us. It's still a finite distance, more than easy enough to fit within the bounds of an infinite universe.


Trivia: The day will come when we can no longer see the background radiation. But not because of distance problems. Rather it will be because, as the expansion of the universe accelerates, eventually we will begin speeding away from the background radiation faster than the speed of light.

heres a pretty good explanation about the "Recombination phase" wherein they've calculated that the CMB began.
http://www.space.com/20330-cosmic-microwave-background-explained-infographic.html

Thanks for the replies..

The wmap being microwave radiation, is possibly likely to have moved out faster out towards the outer space, much before dust started forming clusters and galaxies.. I assumed a unidirectional microwave radiation emanating out from the 300000 year old universe and would not be bounced back to be seen by the earth, a few billion years later,

For me two aspects of this are unresolved.

1. How big was the universe when it was 300000 years old. Was it infinite or is it the radial distance from the point of big bang to 3000000 light years?
2. Assuming no edge to the flat universe, where did the microwave radiation reflect back from?

You need to stop thinking about the initial heat flash as happening "somewhere else" and traveling to us. The background radiation happened everywhere including right inside of the space you occupy, because all of space is expanding, it isn't moving away from a single point.

The background microwave radiation we detect is simply the lowest wavelength of residual heat that we have the instrumentation to detect. It is ubiquitous in every direction not so much because it is "far away" but because it is old.

This confuses a bit Lin since it was my understanding that the notion of anything "bouncing" off the "edge" of the Universe makes no sense since it has no edge. I had supposed that something projected from a single loc would travel (for a long time to be sure) in a perfectly straight line, eventually returning from the other direction

But then I guess I'm still living in the 20th Century