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![TMCNet: Big Bang baby photo: Berkeley lab's supercomputer helps detect universe's most ancient light [San Jose Mercury News]](http://images.tmcnet.com/siteart/invisible.gif)
Big Bang baby photo: Berkeley lab's supercomputer helps detect universe's most ancient light [San Jose Mercury News]
(San Jose Mercury News (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) March 21--A supercomputer in downtown Oakland has detected the most ancient light in the universe, assembling an image that reveals that the universe is older, and slower, than we thought.
The powerful Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory computer, housed in a former Wells Fargo Bank vault near the Paramount Theater, analyzed data sent by NASA from Europe's Planck space telescope.
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.
"This is the baby picture of our universe," said physicist Julian Borrill of the Laboratory's Computational Cosmology Center, who worked on the analysis. "It's as far back as we can look."
To the untrained eye, the snapshot looks like 1880s Pointillism rather than 21st century astrophysics -- a maelstrom of orange and blue dots, each representing tiny fluctuations in temperature.
And that's a tidy version of the original mess. When Borrill first looks at the computer screen, he sees jagged peaks and valleys of massive raw data, beamed back from European Space Agency satellites to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
But what it represents is profound: a snapshot of the universe shortly after that crucible moment called the Big Bang
-- when nothing suddenly turned into everything.
Scientists say the image was taken 380,000 years after conception. 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.
That's before galaxies and stars, solar systems and suns. And long, long before us.
It was even before atoms. What the Planck telescope sees are mostly photons, those elemental particles, not detectable light. The image was snapped at the border of the observable universe -- "at the edge of the fog," said Borrill, when tremendous amounts of energy were still banging around.
The picture's colorful dots, or temperature fluctuations, represent the varying densities of the universe, created by its wild expansion post-Big Bang.
"It shows the primordial photons generated by the Big Bang, coming from the beginning of time," Borrill said. "They traveled for 13.8 billion years -- and ended up splattered on our detectors."
Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 650-492-4098.
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(c)2013 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services
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