Ever wondered why the night sky glows uniformly?
Image: David (Deddy) Dayag, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ever wondered why the night sky glows uniformly?
Imagine you're looking at a perfectly dark sky, but you suddenly notice a faint, uniform glow everywhere. It's not coming from stars or planets, but it fills the entire sky.
This glow is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. It's like a cosmic afterglow, filling the universe and telling us about its early moments.
Example
If you spread out 1,000 tiny lights evenly across a room, that's like the CMB filling the universe.
Remember this
The CMB is a snapshot of the universe's infancy, revealing its age, composition, and geometry.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Cosmic microwave background
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Cosmic inflation
Cosmic inflation explains the universe's uniform temperature
Black-body radiation
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the Olbers' paradox asks
Why is the night sky not bright if there are infinite stars?
Gunn–Peterson trough
Why can't we see the universe's infancy clearly?
Physics beyond the Standard Model
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