SPACE.com -- Early Universe Theory Boosted with New Data

The University of Chicago's Degree Angular Scale Interferometer at the South Pole records slight temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, the Big Bang's afterglow. The latest results from DASI substantiate inflation theory.

In this fanciful picture, the CMB sky looms behind the prelaunch preparations of BOOMERANG. The BOOMERANG images of the early universe have been overlaid onto the sky to indicate what size that the fluctuations would appear if a standard 35mm camera were sensitive to microwave light.

This image of 1,800 square degrees of the southern sky was taken using the BOOMERANG telescope for 10 days from December 1998 - January 1999. The apparent size of the moon is at the bottom right. This image shows the distant Universe as it transitions from a glowing 2700 deg C plasma to a transparent gas, about 14 billion years ago.

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	Early Universe Theory Boosted with New Data By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 01:15 pm ET 29 April 2001

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WASHINGTON -- The theory that the universe underwent a gigantic growth spurt in a fraction of a second just moments after the Big Bang was bolstered twice with findings reported Sunday.

According to Inflation theory, the leading model for the formation of the universe, the largest structures in the universe trace their origins to the subatomic world.

Physicists presented their evidence, based on ground-based and high-altitude balloon instruments, here today at the American Physical Society annual spring meeting.

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said the new evidence for cosmic inflation is welcome news.

"There are three guiding principles in the study of how the universe began...the Big Bang theory, inflation and exotic dark matter," Turner said. "These new results greatly strengthen our confidence in all three. We may be made of star stuff, but we are more confident than ever that the universe is not."

Turner said the new results indicate that the bulk of the universe, including our galaxy, is made of a new form of matter.

"It's Christmas for cosmological theorists -- in the past few years we have been given dark energy, a flat universe, acoustic peaks and more evidence for dark energy. They all support our most cherished ideas about how the universe began," Turner said.

Comparable results on Cosmic Inflation theory were gleaned using the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI) at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Center for Astrophysical Research at the South Pole.

In another experiment, largely supported by NASA and the NSF, a sensitive microwave telescope suspended from a balloon has bolstered the theory that the universe grew from a tiny subatomic region during a period of violent expansion a split second after the Big Bang.

Antarctic viewing

The DASI observatory in Antarctica is a highly sensitive interferometer, able to measure subtle temperature variations at an angular resolution of one-tenth of a degree across the sky. That's about a fifth of the Moon's angular size.

DASI detects temperature differences at a time when the universe, now approximately 14 billion years old, was just a kid, at 400,000 years old. DASI sees these temperature differences as a ripple pattern that displays as many as three progressively fainter peaks in the blast waves emanating from the Big Bang.

Another view of the early universe was obtained from a balloon that circumnavigated the Antarctic. High-resolution images of the cosmos were obtained by the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics -- better known as BOOMERANG.

A balloon-toted microwave telescope rose to an altitude of almost 120,000 feet (36,575 meters), cruising there for 10 and a half days.

The intense heat that filled the embryonic universe is still detectable today as a faint glow of microwave radiation known as the cosmic microwave background. This radiation dates from the very early universe and is called an "echo of the Big Bang."

After some two years of studying results from the 1998 BOOMERANG flight, scientists announced that the balloon flight has brought the cosmic microwave background into sharp focus -- that is, at least the 3 percent of the sky that BOOMERANG probed.

Playing a new tune

BOOMERANG has provided the most precise measurement to date of several of the key characteristics which cosmologists use to describe the universe. Images reveal hundreds of complex regions visible as tiny variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background.

The early universe is full of sound waves, compressing and rarefying matter and light, much like sound waves compress and rarefy air inside a flute or trumpet, said Paolo deBernardis, an Italian team member of the BOOMERANG project, in a NASA release detailing the BOOMERANG findings.

By studying the difference in the "harmonic content" imprinted in the cosmic microwave background, the detailed nature of the universe can be discerned.

BOOMERANG data allows cosmologists to hear the "music of creation" in its discovery of acoustic "notes" in the sound waves that rippled through the universe not long after the Big Bang.

DASI and the BOOMERANG data have shown the profound connection between the subatomic world and the cosmos at large.

Further data gleaned by DASI, high-altitude balloon experiments, as well as NASA's soon-to-be-launched Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), will further explore Inflation theory, as well as study its underlying physical cause.

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