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Article: Hey, baby! (Space/Big Bang Theory).(the universe in its infancy )(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Science World
- Article date:
- April 18, 2003
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Scholastic, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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What if you shot a Polaroid of your grandma and the camera spit out her baby picture? Sound impossible? NASA astronomers have designed such a gadget--it's a satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). And it just snapped a picture of the universe as an infant.
The universe began as an unimaginably hot, dense soup of particles and energy. It later expanded and cooled to form stars, galaxies, and planets, according to a scientific theory called the Big Bang. "The Big Bang theory predicted that an afterglow radiation from the young hot era would still permeate the sky today," explains NASA astronomer Charles Bennett. This ...