NASA images offer details about design of the universe
Probe 'confirms suspicions' of events after Big Bang, UBC professor says
PETTI FONG
VANCOUVER -- You may be reassured to know, as physicist Mark Halpern of the University of British Columbia has just learned, that the universe is behaving exactly as it should.
New images from a NASA space probe that Prof. Halpern and scientists from throughout the United States designed and launched five years ago, have provided evidence of what happened 13.7 billion years ago.
Prof. Halpern looked back in time to capture the split second when a mass the size of a pebble expanded exponentially over and over to become the universe, after the Big Bang.
And he saw what he expected to see.
"The simplest version of this fairy tale that is our universe is now dramatically more secure," Prof. Halpern said.
"What surprised me is how incredibly well the simple picture fits. It seems we understand a lot about the universe that until now has been just about guesses. Things are the way we believed they should be."
Cosmic microwave background radiation is the radiant heat left over from the Big Bang and first observed in 1965 by astronomers. From the properties of the radiation, scientists can learn the physical conditions of the universe at its beginning stages.
Images released yesterday detected the earliest light seen yet from the Big Bang afterglow, providing new evidence that the universe grew suddenly in less than a trillionth of a second.
The current picture shows blue and green cool spots, yellow and red hot spots and white slashes to indicate polarization, which tell scientists how material was moving in the beginning when the universe formed.
The information pinpoints when the first stars formed and provides new details about events that transpired in the first trillionth of a second. It's from quantum fluctuations that stars, planets and the galaxies formed.
Mike Nolta, a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, said the images are a relic left over from the beginning of the universe.
"There was an expectation we would see what we're seeing. It basically confirms our suspicions," he said yesterday.
For the past three years, the satellite has continuously observed the cosmic background radiation that lingers from the universe's sudden forceful beginnings billions of years ago from a distance of 1.6 million kilometres away from Earth.
From their observations, scientists were able to report the age of the universe as 13.7 billion years, give or take a few hundred million, and the age of the universe when stars first began to shine, 400 million years later, again with the cushion room of a few million either way.
Prof. Halpern and 12 other U.S. scientists around began the project, but it has since expanded to include a group of 20 physicists who continuously monitor and analyze the patterns and signals received.
Over the past three years, scientists have been able to identify that just 4 per cent of the universe is composed of ordinary familiar atoms.
Researchers have still not been able to identify 22 per cent of the universe, which they call "dark matter."
"It's not atoms, so it remains a mystery. It's some other stuff that doesn't give off light. We know it doesn't bump into other matter, but it gives us something to think about," Prof. Halpern said.
A remaining 74 per cent of the universe is another mysterious substance called dark energy.
Each new piece of the puzzle in determining the origins of the universe is done for pure curiosity, according to Prof. Halpern.
"It's not going to help us understand weather patterns or other things like that," he said.
But reassuringly, the latest images indicate the universe will last even longer than scientists predicted.
Also, its expansion is accelerating, rather than slowing down.
"I used to say the universe will last forever and people would say, 'How do you know that?' " Prof. Halpern said. "Now I can say it will last at least many tens of billions of years and the universe we know will last forever or at least as long as forever means."
