By Ron Cowen
Like beaming parents showing off pictures of their newborn, astronomers this week proudly unveiled the sharpest snapshot of the baby universe ever taken. The scientists had a lot to smile about.
Their infant portrait, revealed by the remnant glow from the Big Bang, pegs the universe’s age to an unprecedented accuracy of 1 percent. Rather than using more approximate numbers, astronomers can now say the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the researchers report. The new data also confirm that the universe began with a brief but humongous growth spurt, dubbed inflation. Inflation stretched to cosmic scales random patches of the fabric of space-time that had minuscule fluctuations in density, creating the lumps from which galaxies arose.