Thanks to the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, scientists have made a significant advancement in their understanding of the universe’s origin. With remarkable accuracy, this potent telescope has produced previously unheard-of images that show the early history of the universe.
People have been looking up at the night sky for millennia, wondering how the universe came into being. The cosmic dawn is finally within our reach thanks to modern technologies. By providing the sharpest view to yet of the density changes in the early cosmos, the ACT telescope has shed light on the formation of galaxies and stars.
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), a feeble radiation remnant of the Big Bang, is an important component of this discovery. Light was able to escape some 380,000 years after the cosmos was created, leaving a “fossil” mark of that period. The CMB has been increasingly precisely mapped by previous missions, such as NASA’s COBE and the ESA’s Planck spacecraft. But now, ACT has gone one step further and shown intricate variations in the density of the early universe.
These findings confirm that the universe was not uniform at birth. Instead, regions with varying densities influenced the formation of the first stars. This research also refines the estimated age of the universe to 13.8 billion years. However, it also highlights the unresolved “Hubble tension” – a persistent mystery regarding the universe’s expansion rate.
Perhaps most excitingly, these discoveries could unlock new insights into dark matter and dark energy, the invisible forces shaping our cosmos. As next-generation telescopes, like the Simons Observatory, come online, we may soon uncover even deeper secrets about the universe’s origins and ultimate fate.
