Mysteries are delightful, perhaps diabolical, insistent and obsessive nags on the curious human imagination. What is the true nature of the Universe and what is our place in the inscrutable cosmic scheme of things? Can we answer these questions, or do they lie beyond our reach, perhaps hidden in secretive exotic corners somewhere beyond the cosmological horizon of our visibility? Indeed, domains that exist beyond our cosmological horizon are so remote that the light traveling to us from those regions has not had the time to reach us since the inflationary Big Bang birth of the Universe almost 14 billion years ago because of the expansion of Space.
Wandering to us throughout the incredibly vast swath of Space and Time, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation carries bewitching clues about what happened long ago and far away in the first magnificent instants of the baby Universe’s mysterious birth Biaya Uhamka.
This background radiation of ancient light is the relic thermal radiation left over from the primordial era of recombination in Big Bang cosmology, and it is a tattle-tale–it gives away the most profound secrets of our Universe to those who live in our cosmic Wonderland. In September 2016, a team of astrophysicists revealed that their study of the CMB radiation shows that the Universe expands the same way in all directions–it has no preferred direction at all.
The CMB is a ghostly, gentle glow of very ancient light that pervades the entire Universe. It streams softly through Space and Time with an almost unvarying intensity from all directions–and it is the relic afterglow of the Big Bang itself. This primordial light that lingers whispers to us some very haunting long-lost secrets about an extremely ancient era that existed long before there were observers to witness it. The CMB is the oldest light that we are able to observe. It began its long journey to us 13. 8 billion years ago–billions of years before our Solar System had formed, and even before our barred spiral Milky Way Galaxy had formed, spinning like a starlit pin-wheel in Space.
The CMB comes to us from a vanished era when all that existed was a turbulent sea of fiery, dazzling radiation and a wild, rushing, screaming flood of elementary particles. The ancient Universe was not the comparatively cold and quiet place that it is now, and the more or less familiar inhabitants of the Universe–stars, planets, moons, and galaxies–all eventually formed from this newborn flood of elementary particles, as the Universe greatly expanded and became increasingly colder and colder. We now look upon the Universe’s dying glow–the lingering ashes of its mysterious fiery formation–as it rushes ever faster and faster to its unknown fate.