What does cosmic background radiation tell us about the universe?
Table of Contents
- 1 What does cosmic background radiation tell us about the universe?
- 2 What is significant about the discovery and uniformity of the cosmic microwave background radiation CMBR )?
- 3 Why do we expect the cosmic background radiation to be almost but not quite the same in all directions?
- 4 What caused inflation of the universe?
What does cosmic background radiation tell us about the universe?
The Big Bang theory predicts that the early universe was a very hot place and that as it expands, the gas within it cools. Thus the universe should be filled with radiation that is literally the remnant heat left over from the Big Bang, called the “cosmic microwave background”, or CMB.
What is significant about the discovery and uniformity of the cosmic microwave background radiation CMBR )?
The CMB is useful to scientists because it helps us learn how the early universe was formed. It is at a uniform temperature with only small fluctuations visible with precise telescopes.
Why do we expect the cosmic background radiation to be almost but not quite the same in all directions?
Why do we expect the cosmic background radiation to be almost, but not quite, the same in all directions? The overall structure of the universe is very uniform, but the universe must have contained some regions of higher density in order for galaxies to form. Why can’t we see past the cosmological horizon?
Why was the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation considered an accident?
Their detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the birth of the universe, provided the strongest possible evidence that the universe expanded from an initial violent explosion, known as The Big Bang.
How did cosmic inflation affect the geometry of the universe?
It increased the linear size of the universe by more than 60 “e-folds”, or a factor of ~10^26 in only a small fraction of a second! Inflation is now considered an extension of the Big Bang theory since it explains the above puzzles so well, while retaining the basic paradigm of a homogeneous expanding universe.
What caused inflation of the universe?
Based on a huge amount of experimental observation and theoretical work, it is now believed that the reason for the observation is that space itself is expanding, and that it expanded very rapidly within the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This kind of expansion is known as a “metric” expansion.