Space probe captures echoes of Big Bang

Published: 7 Jul 10 10:53 CET
The smouldering heat left over from the universe’s creation has been captured in unprecedented detail by a deep space observatory behind which Germany is playing a driving role.

But scientists are most excited about the mottled red, purple and yellow sections at the top and bottom of the image. These colours show cosmic microwave background radiation, the light left over from the Big Bang, when the universe sprang into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

The light pattern is a blueprint for how the universe looked immediately after the Big Bang, when it was just a fiery soup of simple particles, before so much as an atom had formed. It took 300,000 years before this blinding energy cooled enough to start forming matter in the long process of making the stars and galaxies around us.