THE news astronomers have been eagerly awaiting for a decade is here – telescopes probing the faint afterglow of the big bang have detected a subtle effect called polarisation. The finding confirms cosmologists’ view of the early Universe and ushers in a new era of experiments they hope will explain exactly how the Universe expanded just after the big bang and how the first stars formed.
Cosmologists believe that the galaxies we see today grew from tiny density variations in the matter that made up the early Universe. These variations caused temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMBR,…
