The finest ever map of the cosmic microwave background - the faint evidence of the universe's early form - has yielded precise confirmation of the age of the cosmos and its rate of expansion. But for some scientists, the findings offer a frustrating lack of clues to major cosmological mysteries
A new image of the cosmic microwave background radiation for part of the sky – the zoomed in area is about 20 times the width of the moon as seen from Earth ACT Collaboration; ESA/Planck Collaboration Our latest and best ever map of the early universe is five times more detailed than anything we have had before, but while it precisely backs up the leading model of the universe, it is also a double-edged sword because the new data also offers no clues to solving some of cosmology's biggest mysteries. The map shows the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a faint remnant radiation from the early stages of the universe. It began as the earliest light just 380,000 years after the big bang, but billions of years of the universe expanding have shifted its frequency from the visible spectrum to microwave. Advertisement Now, new data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has given us a clearer image of the CMB – albeit only from the half of the sky that can be imaged from the observatory's location in Chile. Jo Dunkley at Princeton University, who worked on the project, says that the data has nailed down with better precision the ingredients of the universe, its size, its age and its expansion rate. But the really key discovery was that nothing contradicted the current leading model of the universe, known as lambda-CDM. Previous data put the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years and the rate at which it is expanding – known as the Hubble constant – at 67 to 68 kilometres per second per megaparsec distance from Earth. ACT data essentially confirms this, but increases the precision and confidence in those findings. Sign up to our Lost in Space-Time newsletter Untangle the weirdness of reality with our…