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Articles on Cosmic microwave background

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Fosalba & Gaztañaga 2021, MNRAS

Cosmological models are built on a simple, century-old idea – but new observations demand a radical rethink

New deep-space discoveries suggest the Universe is lumpy and lopsided. But if matter is distributed unevenly, we’ll have to rethink the simple geometry used in cosmological models.
ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Martel

Why is the sky dark at night? The 200-year history of a question that transformed our understanding of the Universe

The darkness of the night sky seems so obvious as to need no explanation – yet it has intrigued and baffled scientists for centuries.
No one knows what kicked off the Big Bang that eventually allowed the stars to begin forming. Adolf Schaller for STScI

How could an explosive Big Bang be the birth of our universe?

The term ‘Big Bang’ might make you think of a massive explosion. Put the thought out of your head. Rather than an explosion, it was the start of everything in the universe.
Part of the new map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey. Chihway Chang/University of Chicago/DES collaboration

What a new map of the universe tells us about dark matter

We still can’t see the dark matter thought to make up about a quarter of the universe, but at least now we have a map of its structure.
Move over, multiverse theory. ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Enormous hole in the universe may not be the only one

Astronomers have found a giant void in space that explains a mysterious cold spot in the sky. But the search is already on for other voids – and finding them could undermine the discovery.
Some of the antennas of the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope, designed to uncover what happened in the first billion years of the universe. Curtin University

Unlocking the mystery of the first billion years of the universe

More than 100 million years has been wiped off the age of the first stars but there is still the question of what happened in the first billion years of the universe. Earlier this month the European Space…
New data reveals no evidence of gravitational waves in the early universe, as observed by the BICEP2 radio telescope (pictured) near the South Pole. teffen Richter, Harvard University

Gravitational wave discovery still clouded by galactic dust

One of this century’s greatest potential discoveries concerning the origins of the universe has now fallen to galactic dust. That’s according to a new joint-analysis of all the existing data – including…
Planck telescope and the Cosmic microwave background. ESA and Planck

BICEP2 ‘gravity wave’ finding clouded by interstellar dust

In March, scientists working on the BICEP2 experiment, a microwave telescope based at the South Pole, announced that they had seen ‘gravity waves’ from the early universe, created just after the Big Bang…
There’s a lot of dust between us and the edge of the universe. H Raab/Flickr

Has dust clouded the discovery of gravitational waves?

It’s almost three months since a team of scientists announced it had detected polarised light from the afterglow of the Big Bang. But questions are still being asked about whether cosmic dust may have…
Scary but fascinating. NASA and M. Weiss (Chandra X -ray Center)

From black holes to dark matter, an astrophysicist explains

Katherine Mack, astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne, answered questions posed by the public on Reddit. The Conversation has curated the highlights. Dark Matter How do you explain dark matter…

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