The final results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope offer the sharpest, most sensitive view of the early cosmos that anyone has ever seen
Sometimes, a picture can be worth much more than a thousand words. For instance, one measure associated with the pictures below—new high-definition snapshots of the cosmos in its infancy—is 1,900 "zetta-suns." Two views of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the big bang, as seen by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The upper image shows ACT's measurements of CMB temperature augmenting earlier measurements from the Planck satellite, while the lower image shows ACT's measurements of CMB polarization. Blue and orange denote variations in temperature and polarization. Each image's zoomed-in portion is 10 degrees across, or twenty times the Moon' s width seen from Earth. ACT Collaboration; ESA/Planck Collaboration On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Equivalent to almost two trillion trillion suns, that's the amount of mass (or its counterpart as energy) that these images show to exist in the entire observable universe, which extends almost 50 billion light-years in all directions. The images, released today, are among the final results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), a National Science Foundation–funded observatory that operated on a mountaintop in Chile from 2007 until 2022. The researchers will present their results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, tomorrow at a meeting of the American Physical Society. "What I love about these new images is how they bring the whole history of the universe to life," says Jo Dunkley, a Princeton University cosmologist, who led the ACT analysis group. "The fact that you can just look out into the sky to see the whole sweep of cosmic time is beautiful. And with ACT, we've been able to see this better than ever before." What Did ACT See? ACT observed…