New observations with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile reveal the earliest-ever "baby pictures" of our universe, showing some of the oldest light we can possibly see.
This is the clearest image yet of the faint afterglow from the Big Bang, known as the cosmic microwave background radiation (half-sky image on the left, closeup on the right). Orange and blue represent varying intensities of radiation, revealing new gas clouds in the universe. The Milky Way appears as a red band in the half-sky view. Analyzing this cosmic microwave background in high definition has allowed researchers to confirm a simple model of the universe and rule out many competing alternatives. Astronomers have released the clearest images yet of the infant universe — and they confirm that the leading theory of the universe's evolution accurately describes its early stages. The new images capture light that travelled for more than 13 billion years to reach the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. They show the cosmos when it was just 380,000 years old — much like seeing baby pictures of our now middle-aged universe. At that time, our universe emitted the cosmic microwave background as it emerged from its intensely hot, opaque state following the Big Bang , enabling space to become transparent. This faint afterglow marks the first accessible snapshot of our universe's infancy. Rather than just the transition from dark to light, however, the new images reveal in high resolution the formation and motions of gas clouds of primordial hydrogen and helium, which, over millions to billions of years, coalesced into the stars and galaxies we see today. "We can see right back through cosmic history — from our own Milky Way, out past distant galaxies hosting vast black holes and huge galaxy clusters, all the way to that time of infancy," Jo Dunkley , a…