Big Bang Earliest Photo Reveals Universe to be Older, Have More Matter

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite has taken the most detailed map of the universe ever created, one that showed it to be 80 million to 100 million years older, as well as showing some interesting anomalies that scientists can't yet explain.

Their picture is a more refined look at the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, the ambient thermal radiation that's left over from the birth of the universe. Satellites were used to measure the tiny temperature fluctuations on the microwave radiation left over from when the first atoms were made, some 400,000 years after the Big Bang. This radiation bathes the whole cosmos and is an imprint of its infancy. The snapshot reveals the young universe was a scorching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And it was crammed into a space about 1,000 times smaller than our current universe.

It compiled a portrait of an infant cosmos that was hot, small and crowded - and traced our creation back 13.8 billion years, about 100 million years older than previous estimates. Its analysis also revealed a rate of expansion that is slower than seen from other space telescopes, forcing some theoretical re-thinking.

The picture is "is based on the initial 15.5 months of data from Planck and is the mission's first all-sky picture of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380,000 years old," according to a statement released by the European Space Agency.

The map results suggest the universe is expanding more slowly than scientists thought, and is 13.8 billion years old, 100 million years older than previous estimates. The data also show there is less dark energy and more matter, both normal and dark matter, in the universe than previously known. The new calculations also reveal that the universe has about 3 percent more girth that assumed, and it is expanding about 3 percent more slowly. It holds slightly less dark energy, and more dark matter.

Dark matter is an invisible substance that only can be seen through the effects of its gravity, while dark energy is pushing our universe apart. The nature of both remains mysterious.

"Astronomers worldwide have been on the edge of their seats waiting for this map," said Joan Centrella, Planck program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These measurements are profoundly important to many areas of science, as well as future space missions," he said.

"We've uncovered a fundamental truth of the universe,' said George Esfthathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge who announced the Planck satellite mapping. 'There's less stuff that we don't understand by a tiny amount."