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    Shadows in the Big Bang Afterglow Reveal Invisible Cosmic Structures

    Cosmologists are using secondary signatures from the cosmic microwave background to map the universe’s hidden matter. The post Shadows in the Big Bang Afterglow Reveal Invisible Cosmic Structures appeared first on Nautilus.
    by Zack Savitsky Mar 17, 2023 5 minutes

    Nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the primordial plasma of the infant universe cooled enough for the first atoms to coalesce, making space for the embedded radiation to soar free. That light—the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—continues to stream through the sky in all directions, broadcasting a snapshot of the early universe that’s picked up by dedicated telescopes and even revealed in the static on old cathode-ray televisions.

    After scientists discovered the CMB radiation in 1965, they meticulously mapped its tiny temperature variations, which displayed the exact state of the cosmos when it was a mere frothing plasma. Now they’re repurposing CMB data to catalog the large-scale structures that developed over billions of years as the universe matured.

    “That light experienced a bulk of the history of the universe, and by seeing how, a cosmologist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

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