Astrophysicists are poring over new data from Europe’s Planck cosmic background explorer for clues to the period in the early universe known as inflation, when the Big Bang theoretically was ...

A new image of cosmic microwave background radiation (half-sky image at left, closeup at right) adds high definition from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to an earlier image from the Planck satellite.

Two Cosmic Microwave Background anomalies hinted at by the Planck observatory's predecessor, NASA's WMAP, are confirmed in new high-precision data revealed on March 21, 2013. In this image, ...

A never-before-seen image of the cosmic microwave background, combining data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the Planck satellite, offers a high-definition view of the early Universe.

This is the cosmic microwave background as seen by the WMAP satellite. This radiation was emitted when the Universe was 380,000 years old and has an average temperature of 2.7 Kelvin. The red and ...

In this illustration, the trajectory of cosmic microwave background (CMB) light is bent by structures known as filaments that are invisible to our eyes, creating an effect known as weak lensing ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. One of the largest galaxy clusters ever seen shines bright in this image from the Hubble ...

Using antennae, scientists first identified the cosmic microwave background in the 1960s. Since then physicists have built more and more sophisticated instruments to capture increasingly better images ...

The cosmic microwave background was created 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when the Universe cooled enough to allow electrons to link up with protons and form hydrogen atoms.

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope has produced the clearest images of the universe at 380,000 years old, revealing detailed polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

WMAP launched June 30, 2001, with the goal of sensing subtle temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background, the glow of the first atoms to release their radiation 380,000 years after ...