Astronomers have released a new "baby picture" of the universe.
The all-sky image draws on nine years' worth of data from a now-retired spacecraft dubbed the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
"We are just a speck in the vastness of the universe, so it is amazing that we have the ability to answer fundamental questions about the vast universe around us, but the WMAP team has done just that," Charles Bennett, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who heads the team, wrote in an email to SPACE.com. "It was possible because we can detect and study the ancient light, the oldest light in the universe."
These patterns allow astronomers to predict what could have possibly happened earlier, and what has happened in the billions of year since the universe's infancy. As such, the spacecraft has been instrumental in pushing forward cosmological theories about the nature and origin of the universe.
Among other revelations, the data from WMAP revealed a much more precise estimate for the age of the universe — 13.7 billion years — and confirmed that about 95 percent of it is composed of mind-boggling stuff called dark matter and dark energy. WMAP data also helped scientists nail down the curvature of space to within 0.4 percent of "flat," and pinpoint the time when the universe began to emerge from the cosmic dark ages (about 400 million years after the Big Bang.)
"The universe encoded its autobiography in the microwave patterns we observe across the whole sky," Bennett said in a statement. "When we decoded it, the universe revealed its history and contents. It is stunning to see everything fall into place."
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