By Ron Cowen
The latest observations of the cosmic microwave background, the faint glow left over from the Big Bang, are giving cosmologists quite a turn.
Revealing for the first time that microwave-background photons from adjacent patches of the sky vibrate in slightly different directions, the discovery confirms that by studying that background “we really are observing the universe as it was about 300,000 years after the Big Bang,” says theorist Wayne Hu of the University of Chicago. The finding verifies that just about everything astronomers thought they understood about the early universe and the emergence of galaxies is likely to be true, he adds.