Pop-up universe

• Autores: Maggie McKee
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2937, 2013, págs. 38-41
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • McKee investigates how the universe expanded after the big bang. Inflation proposes that the corner of space expanded by a factor or 10^sup 25^ or more in a tiny fraction of a second soon after the big bang. To get a sense of how incredible this expansion is, imagine the full stop at the end of this sentence growing to one million light years across in the blink of an eye. Yet this remarkable theory has become part of our standard picture of cosmology because it seems to elegantly account for a number of astronomical puzzles. Observations show that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is the same temperature everywhere to within 0.0003°C. That's surprising because it is also true for parts of the sky that appear too far away for light to have had time to travel between them. So there is no way heat radiation could have evened out the roiling temperatures present at the universe's birth.