Posted on 03/20/2006 9:16:50 AM PST by Red Badger
New NASA space-probe observations of the oldest light in the cosmos are the most direct evidence yet that the universe expanded extremely quickly immediately after the big bang, physicists say.
Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, led the team overseeing NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). He and colleagues announced the new results Thursday in a teleconference.
Picture: Map of the early universe, just after the big bang
Previous experiments—including WMAP results released in 2003—had provided strong evidence for the rapid-expansion theory, called inflation, that was first proposed by physicist Alan Guth in 1980.
In the trillion-trillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded from the size of a gumball to astronomical proportions, according to the inflation theory. The universe then settled into a more leisurely pace of expansion over the past 13.7 billion years or so.
Smoking Gun
WMAP now has the most convincing evidence yet for inflation: a reading of the light released just after the big bang. This cosmic afterglow, known as microwave background, is made of a similar type of radiation to that which carries signals to a TV antenna.
The afterglow is as valuable to a cosmologist as the earliest fossils are to a paleontologist. It is the oldest radiation ever detected, still traveling almost 14 billion years after it was emitted.
The microwaves bathe the entire universe in a perpetual buzz, reaching Earth from all directions. The buzz is virtually uniform, but not quite.
Tiny variations at different points in space allow scientists to draw maps of the early universe, as the WMAP team has done with unprecedented detail.
These cosmic baby pictures show us a time when the universe was a smooth, fiery broth, when stars and galaxies had yet to form under the pull of gravity (photo: another view of the early universe).
Finer Points
The team said cosmologists will now be able to delve into the finer details of how inflation happened.
They can find an age on light? weird...
There you have it....there was a big bang and everything just fell right into place.
Perhaps if they saw God's hand in the middle of the photo, it would provide better information as to HOW it happened?
Nah, that would remove the mystery of the Father and probably send atheists into hysterics.
Hard to wrap my brain around this.
My first thought is that that exceeds the speed of light by a long shot, but I think they're saying that the space itself expanded, not the matter within it, but then the matter had to expand pretty fast as well, but maybe a mile was a different distance if space itself was expanding, but then the mile would still be expanding if the universe is expanding...
And then my brain glazes over, and green stuff starts oozing out my ears.
Look closely...you might see God snapping his fingers.
...and God said, "Let there be light!" And there was light.........
I'm fascinated by the possibility that the speed of light
may have been faster, maybe almost infinite, in the very
early universe.
Then came the Cosmic Cigarette.
The post-big bang inflation occurred because Greenspan wasn't there to stop it...
Genesis 1
1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
3. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
4. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
5. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
6. Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."
7. God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.
8. God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
9. Then God said, "Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear"; and it was so.
10. God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good.
11. Then God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them"; and it was so.
12. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.
Guess in all honesty, no mortal ever can comprehend the immensity of God's eternity and self sufficiency and the amazing power within His wisdom and creativity.
Once again the fallacy of wanting to think something was created from nothing by chance. That's completely illogical. Something was created from nothing, but it was created by His Grace.
...And the gumball of matter came from...??
The big bang is when He comes riding on a cloud shining like the sun, who will be ready? The abortion run congress?
As far as I understand it, space-time is filled with a range of potential and real particles, so that there's a certain amount of uncertainty about how much mass is in each unit of area. Heisenberg's principle says that with the smaller area you're looking at, the uncertainty over either the amount of mass you have or over that mass' velocity has to go up. So the possibility is that with enough time, it's possible for an amount of mass the size of the universe to just appear into existence. And -- this last part, I have to admit, sounds like one of Kant's antimonies -- before space-time existed, there was an infinite amount of time in which that probability could occur, so it did occur.
It's been two years since I took this stuff, though, so I could very well have got the details wrong.
Are you implying that Genesis here describes the Big Bang? According to Genesis, the Earth was created before the sun and the stars. This is just one of several divergences between Genesis and the Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang directly contradicts the biblical account of the birth of the universe.
Don't you know ... that question is outside the scope of scientific investigation.
Besides, the Big Bang theory says light didn't appear until 300,000 years after the creation of the universe, when there was enough space for photons to escape solid matter.
From the pronouncements of NASA come absolute truths dribbling down like the shedding heat shields from the shuttle flights.
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