Is this what the Big Bang looked like?

Is this what the Big Bang looked like? Astronomical image shows the split-second after universe began... and reveals the 'oldest light' ever cast on the sky

New results from a look into the split second after the Big Bang
Shows oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380 000 years old

PUBLISHED: 11:12 GMT, 21 March 2013 | UPDATED: 18:17 GMT, 21 March 2013

Scientists have revealed the most detailed map of the early universe ever created.
Captured by the European Space Agency Planck satellite, it shows the split second after the Big Bang - and indicates the universe is 80 million years older that scientists had thought.
Planck's portrait shows the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380,000 years old.
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The most detailed map of the universe ever created - based on the initial 15.5 months of data from Planck and is the mission¿s first all-sky picture of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380 000 years old

WHAT IS PLANCK?

Planck’s primary goal is to observe the Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and to extract its encoded information about what our universe is made of, and the origin of its structure.
This relic radiation can only be reached once all sources of foreground emission, such as the galactic haze and the carbon monoxide signals, have been identified and removed.
The latest image shows oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380,000 years old.

The image is based on the initial 15.5 months of data from the £515m Planck space telescope.
'The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant Universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete,' said says Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General.
Planck data also set a new value for the rate at which the Universe is expanding today, implying that the age of the Universe is 13.82 billion years - 80 million years older than previously thought.
The findings bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second.
George Esfthathiou, an astrophysicist who announced the Planck satellite mapping on Thursday, says the findings also offer new specificity of the universe's composition.
'To a cosmologist, this map is a gold mine of information,'he said.
He says it is made up of slightly more ordinary matter and less of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
'Since the release of Planck’s first all-sky image in 2010, we have been carefully extracting and analysing all of the foreground emissions that lie between us and the Universe’s first light, revealing the cosmic microwave background in the greatest detail yet,' said George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge, UK.

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The image is based on the initial 15.5 months of data from Planck and is the mission’s first all-sky picture of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380 000 years old.
At that time, the young Universe was filled with a hot dense soup of interacting protons, electrons and photons at about 2700ºC.
When the protons and electrons joined to form hydrogen atoms, the light was set free.
As the Universe has expanded, this light today has been stretched out to microwave wavelengths, equivalent to a temperature of just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.

The new 'recipe for the universe': Planck's high-precision cosmic microwave background map has allowed scientists to extract the most refined values yet of the Universe¿s ingredients.

This ‘cosmic microwave background’ – CMB – shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities at very early times, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.
According to the standard model of cosmology, the fluctuations arose immediately after the Big Bang and were stretched to cosmologically large scales during a brief period of accelerated expansion known as inflation.
Planck was designed to map these fluctuations across the whole sky with greater resolution and sensitivity than ever before.
By analysing the nature and distribution of the seeds in Planck’s CMB image, we can determine the composition and evolution of the Universe from its birth to the present day.

An artist's conception shows the Planck spacecraft against a microwave view of the sky.

Overall, the information extracted from Planck’s new map provides an excellent confirmation of the standard model of cosmology at an unprecedented accuracy, the researchers say.
But because precision of Planck’s map is so high, it also made it possible to reveal some peculiar unexplained features that may well require new physics to be understood.
One of the most surprising findings is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky.
This runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look.
Furthermore, a cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected.
The asymmetry and the cold spot had already been hinted at with Planck’s predecessor, NASA’s WMAP mission, but were largely ignored because of lingering doubts about their cosmic origin
'The fact that Planck has made such a significant detection of these anomalies erases any doubts about their reality; it can no longer be said that they are artefacts of the measurements.
'They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation,' says Paolo Natoli of the University of Ferrara, Italy.
'Imagine investigating the foundations of a house and finding that parts of them are weak. You might not know whether the weaknesses will eventually topple the house, but you’d probably start looking for ways to reinforce it pretty quickly all the same,' adds François Bouchet of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.
One way to explain the anomalies is to propose that the Universe is in fact not the same in all directions on a larger scale than we can observe, ESA said.
In this scenario, the light rays from the CMB may have taken a more complicated route through the Universe than previously understood, resulting in some of the unusual patterns observed today.

Space telescope reveals almost perfect universe

The results show a cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected, challenging theories of the symmetry of the universe

'Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together.
'But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed - and that’s exciting,' says Professor Efstathiou.
Beyond the anomalies, however, the Planck data conform spectacularly well to the expectations of a rather simple model of the Universe, allowing scientists to extract the most refined values yet for its ingredients.
Normal matter that makes up stars and galaxies contributes just 4.9% of the mass/energy density of the Universe. Dark matter, which has thus far only been detected indirectly by its gravitational influence, makes up 26.8%, nearly a fifth more than the previous estimate.

Old and new: The previous best image of cosmic background radiation, (left), compared to the new Planck images released today (right)

Conversely, dark energy, a mysterious force thought to be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe, accounts for less than previously thought.
'With the most accurate and detailed maps of the microwave sky ever made, Planck is painting a new picture of the Universe that is pushing us to the limits of understanding current cosmological theories,” says Jan Tauber, ESA’s Planck Project Scientist.
'We see an almost perfect fit to the standard model of cosmology, but with intriguing features that force us to rethink some of our basic assumptions.
'This is the beginning of a new journey and we expect that our continued analysis of Planck data will help shed light on this conundrum.'

ESA's history of the universe from the Big Bang until today

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'Infant' universe, born before we knew

Date: March 22, 2013 - 11:13AM

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This image allows astronomers to look back to the foundations of the universe, writes Dennis Overbye.

Bing Bang map shows oldest light

Analysis of the best ever map of the earliest light reveals the shape of the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

Astronomers released the latest and most exquisite baby picture yet of the universe on Thursday, one that showed it to be 80 million to 100 million years older and a little fatter, with more light and dark matter than previously thought, and perhaps ever so slightly lopsided.
Recorded by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, the image is a heat map of the cosmos as it appeared only 380,000 years after the Big Bang, showing space speckled with faint spots from which galaxies would grow over billions of years.

It shows the seeds from which the current universe grew.
Marc Kamionkowski, Johns Hopkins University

The map, the Planck team said is in stunning agreement with the general view of the universe that has emerged during the past 20 years, of a cosmos dominated by dark energy that is pushing it apart, and dark matter that is pulling galaxies together. It also shows a universe that seems to have endured an explosive burp known as inflation, which was the dynamite in the Big Bang.

A view of the cosmic microwave background collected by the European Space Agency?s Planck satellite. The heat map of the cosmos was imprinted on the sky when the universe was just 380,000 years old. Photo: ESA

In a statement issued by the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain, its director-general, said, "The extraordinary quality of Planck's portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete."
Marc Kamionkowski, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who commented on the work at a news teleconference sponsored by NASA, called Planck "cosmology's human genome project".
"It shows the seeds from which the current universe grew," he said.

A map of relic radiation (microwave sky) from the Big Bang. Photo: ESA

David N. Spergel, a Princeton University cosmologist, described the new results as "beautiful", adding that "the standard cosmological model looks even stronger today than yesterday. The universe remains simple and strange."
Within the standard cosmological framework, however, the new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board. The universe appears to be slightly lumpier, with bigger and more heat spots on one side than on the other, for example, and there is an unexplained cool spot in the middle of the map.
Those anomalies had shown up on previous maps by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, satellite, but some had argued that they were because of a bad analysis or contamination from the Milky Way.

The evolution of satellites designed to measure ancient light left over from the Big Bang: From left: NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, 1989; the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, 2001; Planck, 2009. Photo: ESA

Now cosmologists will have to take them more seriously, said Max Tegmark, an expert on the early universe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not part of the Planck team and who called the new results "very exciting".
It could be, he said, that "the universe is trying to tell us something".
George Efstathiou of Cambridge University, one of the leaders of the Planck project, said in the European Space Agency news release: "Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don't know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that's exciting."
The Planck satellite was launched in 2009 and has been scanning the sky ever since, recording the faint variations in a haze of radio microwaves that fill the sky. Those microwaves are believed to be the cooled-off remains of the fires of the Big Bang, shown 380,000 years later, when the first hydrogen atoms formed.
The microwaves were discovered by accident in 1965 by a pair of Bell Labs radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Using balloons, a U-2 spy plane and a series of satellites like the WMAP, astronomers have been teasing out the detailed features of this radiation.
Analysing the relative sizes and frequencies of spots and ripples has allowed astronomers to describe the birth of the universe so precisely that it would make the philosophers weep.
The new data have allowed astronomers to tweak their model a bit. It now seems the universe is 13.8 billion years old, instead of 13.7 billion, and consists by mass of 4.9 per cent atoms, 27 per cent dark matter and 71 per cent dark energy.
The biggest surprise here, astronomers said, is that the universe is expanding slightly more slowly than previous measurements had indicated. The Hubble constant, which characterises the expansion rate, is 67 kilometres per second per megaparsec — the units astronomers use — according to Planck. Recent ground-based measurements combined with the WMAP data gave a value of 69, offering enough of a discrepancy to make cosmologists re-run their computer simulations of cosmic history.
The fact that astronomers once would go to war with one another over a factor of two in measurements of this parameter shows how cosmology has progressed over the past 20 years.
Pressed for a possible explanation for the discrepancy, Martin White, a Planck team member from the University of California, Berkeley, said it represents a mismatch between measurements made at the beginning of time and those made more recently. He said it could mean that dark energy, which is speeding up the expansion of the universe, is more complicated than cosmologists thought. He termed the possibility "pretty radical", adding, "That would be pretty exciting."
The data also offered striking support for the notion of inflation, which has been the backbone of Big Bang theorising for 30 years.
Under the influence of a mysterious force-field during the first fraction of a second, what would become the observable universe ballooned by 100 trillion trillion times in size from a subatomic pinprick to a grapefruit in less than a violent eye-blink, according to the story first enunciated by Alan Guth of MIT.
Submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in this force-field are what would produce the hot spots in the cosmic microwaves, which in turn would grow into galaxies. According to Planck's measurements, those fluctuations so far fit the predictions of the simplest model of inflation, invented by Andrei Linde of Stanford, to a tee.
Dr Tegmark of MIT said, "We're homing in on the simplest model."
Cosmologists still don't know what might have caused inflation, but the recent discovery of the Higgs boson has provided evidence that the kinds of fields that can provoke such behaviour really exist.
Dr Tegmark and others said that another clue to the nature of inflation could come from the anomalies in the microwave data, which tend to happen on the largest scales in the universe. By the logic of quantum cosmology, they were the first patterns to be laid down on the emerging cosmos — that is to say, when inflation was just starting.
He compared it to walking in someplace and encountering a fight. If the fight had been going on for a while, he said, it is impossible to tell who started it or who was hurt first. But if you come in only a few seconds after it started, you have a better chance of figuring out who did what to whom.
"It may be," he said, "we're coming in early to the cosmic brawl."
New York Times

Keep off food colours: Experts

TNN | Mar 21, 2013, 06.56 AM IST

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READ MORE Atul Shende|Preeti Shukla|Manish Swamy|Food and Drug Administration

INDORE: That tempting brown pastry at the bakery, bright yellow jalebi, and blue coloured ice ball to relieve you from the heat. The colourful eatables may look like a good treat for your taste buds, but it might as well get you many life threatening diseases. Food colours that have become irreplaceable ingredients of most of our meals might help improve appearance of a dish. But it can be responsible for causing many irreversible effects on our health.

From carcinogens or cancer causing agents in some cases containing toxins like lead and arsenics, a few food colours might lead to severe health hazards. Gastroenterologist Dr Atul Shende sharing his recent experiences wherein food colours came up to be as cause of certain abdominal ailments, said, "Recently we have been receiving many young patients with pancreatitis, it's a condition where pancreas is known to get inflamed. The most common cause for this condition is alcohol consumption or gall bladder stone."

Elaborating, he said, "But in last few cases, patients I treated for this condition were young children. Also, all of them said they had consumed chocolate or black forest pastry, which are known to contain brown food colour. "Not that it had been studied yet, but Shende seemed to be sure of his observation and might take the matter up the matter with food officer." "We are not very sure of the chemical composition of the brown food colour, but I am confident that it has to be blamed. With the uniformity in the cases of pancreatitis and their causes there nothing to suggest otherwise, we might write to the food officer about it in the future."

It's not just one colour which can be treated as a health hazard, chief dietician, Mohak Hospital, Dr Preeti Shukla said, "Food colours that we add to our meals at home to make our food look attractive can cause lifelong damage to body and brain. There are certain colours which cause insomnia, lack of appetite, gastro intestinal problems, skin problems, and some can even lead to cancer. I personally suggest my patients to stay away from such ingredients."

Although there is no getting away from these colours when decide to go out and eat "When you eat at a hotel, and if you happen to order a dish which might have added colours, it would show on your fingers even when washed. So avoid ordering the same dish the next time you eat out or may be eat somewhere else. Eating Chinese food outside can also lead to many health troubles, it contains Ajinomoto or Monosodium glutamate (MSG) which known to have many harmful effects."

Food Officer Indore, Manish Swamy said, "Packaged food that sells in markets normally have food grade colours and are used to according to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards. Apart from that we conduct regular inspection at eateries and hotels in the city. At an average, 10 hotels are inspected every month. Action is taken against any one found violating rules.

E MANN