For Astronomers, Big Bang Confirmation

The most detailed and precise map yet produced of the universe just after its birth confirms the Big Bang theory in triumphant detail and opens new chapters in the early history of the cosmos, astronomers said yesterday.

It reveals the emergence of the first stars in the cosmos, only 200 million years after the Big Bang, some half a billion years earlier than theorists had thought, and gives a first tantalizing hint at the physics of the "dynamite" behind the Big Bang.

Astronomers said the map results lent impressive support to the strange picture that has emerged recently: the universe is expanding at an ever-faster rate, pushed apart by a mysterious "dark energy."

By comparing their data with other astronomical observations, the astronomers have also made far more precise calculations of the basic parameters that characterize the universe, including its age, geometry, composition and weight.

In a nutshell, the universe is 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus one percent; a recent previous estimate had a margin of error three times as much. By weight it is 4 percent atoms, 23 percent dark matter - presumably undiscovered elementary particles left over from the Big Bang - and 73 percent dark energy. And it is geometrically "flat," meaning that parallel lines will not meet over cosmic scales.

The result, the astronomers said, is a seamless and consistent history of the universe, from its first few seconds, when it was a sizzling soup of particles and energy, to the modern day and a sky beribboned with chains of pearly galaxies inhabited by at least one race of puzzled and ambitious bipeds.

WMAP