Has Science discovered God - Whisperings
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Has Science discovered God
Greatest Story Never Told
Has Science Discovered God
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has been mapping the sizes and strengths of the slight irregularities in the cosmic microwave background radiation filling the sky. The microwave background is the "wallpaper" on the sky behind everything else seen in the universe. The slight temperature irregularities written on it (seen on the all-sky map here) tell much about the cosmic conditions just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe first became transparent to its own radiation, and before, right back to the Big Bang itself.
This representation symbolizes the evolution of the universe over 13.7 billion years. The far left depicts the Big Bang, the earliest moment we can yet probe, when an extremely brief moment of "inflation" produced a burst of exponential growth. (Size is symbolized by the vertical extent in this graphic). For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed, due to the gravitational pull of everything on everything else. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up as the repulsive effect of dark energy has come to overpower the universe's self-gravity.
Today's microwave background radiation was emitted 380,000 years after inflation, when the stuff of the universe first became transparent. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this radiation; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe.
NASA / WMAP Science Team