Cosmic baby snaps hint at bubbly birth

摘要

The universe was born as a space-time bubble that popped up inside an even bigger metaverse. So hint tiny anomalies in our best maps yet of the infant cosmos. Our most widely accepted theory of cosmic origins says that the very young universe inflated from a pinprick to a huge expanse in a sliver of a second - a process called inflation. Ten years ago the first maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the light emitted shortly after the big bang - gave strong support to this theory. The maps showed that the soup of matter filling the early universe varied slightly in density. These variations were the seeds of the stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters that form the large-scale structure we see today.