Seoulscapade

Snapshot of the early universe, showing temperature fluctuations of the remnant glow from the Big Bang.

It’s official, the universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take 120 million years.

This profound news, and other findings released with it, appears not to have generated a huge reception other than in the scientific community. To my mind, this is probably the world’s biggest news item. True, some of news isn’t radically new, but it confirms what we know with greater accuracy. It is new in the sense that it narrows down the facts, eliminates some theories, and gives us a more precise picture of the universe.

The findings are from the study of 5 years of data from Nasa’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). This satellite was designed to map the universe by examining the light, seen in the form of microwaves, created soon after the so-called Big Bang. The probe basically looks back to when the universe was 380,000 years old. At this point the universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to combine into hydrogen atoms, which released light. Then, over the billions of years of the expansion of the Universe, the light has cooled and its wavelength has been stretched from ultraviolet to microwave.

FromWMAP press release here, comes this news:

The universe is awash in a sea of cosmic neutrinos. These almost weightless sub-atomic particles zip around at nearly the speed of light. Millions of cosmic neutrinos pass through you every second.

“A block of lead the size of our entire solar system wouldn’t even come close to stopping a cosmic neutrino,” said science team member Eiichiro Komatsu of the University of Texas at Austin.

I’m starting to feel kind of itchy. Would it be fair to say that the neutrinos passing through me have possibly passed through other things, like a planet? I presume so.

Here are the other main WMAP results, as summarized by Phil Plait, the astronomy, writer, and skeptic of Bad Astronomy fame:

A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:

• The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.

• The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.

• The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.

• The Universe is flat.

• The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

At point one, you’ll note that Phil makes an amusing aside about the morons who believe the universe is 6000 years old. Which relates to why I’m a bit disgruntled about the low register in the media regarding this news. If only significant news in science were given a more prominent position in the media, people would be more educated. More creationists and other wackos might be urged to reexamine their beliefs more closely and discover them for what they are, childish delusions.

Anything to do with uncovering the nature of the universe, one would think, is worthy of front page headlines. It’s the biggest news out there.