Science Provides Another Big Bang : Satellite investigation uncovers evidence of expanding universe
“They have found the Holy Grail of cosmology,” an elated astrophysicist said of this week’s announcement that there are wrinkles in the fabric of the universe.
The wrinkles are important to the theory that the universe, as intelligent life on Earth knows it, started with a Big Bang. It was, the theory says, an explosion of something smaller than the point of a needle that in the end was to be responsible for all of the matter in the universe. But what turned the gases--in what had always seemed to be a smooth and seamless scattering of energy and matter--into stars and galaxies and planets? The wrinkles explain it.
Ripples in the gaseous fabric of the early universe, the scientists believe, generated enough gravity to pull together gases into increasingly dense clusters that evolved into larger and larger lumps and eventually stars and galaxies.
Over the years scientists have become virtually unanimous in believing that the Big Bang occurred just as it first occurred to the scientific mind in the 1920s, drawing on Albert Einstein’s theories about forces of gravity and on an assumption that the universe is a space with no edges, no boundaries.
The new evidence reinforcing beleaguered theorists of the Big Bang started with a Delta rocket being launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 1989, a rocket of the same breed that scientists and technicians fashioned primarily for fighting wars.
The rocket put a satellite in orbit with three radiometers capable of detecting electromagnetic radiation generated by the Big Bang.
The clue to the wrinkles, to the Grail, were minute differences in temperature in those microwaves that astrophysicist George Smoot of the University of California and his colleagues from campuses and labs all over the country measured with computers. For more than a year, they checked and double-checked 70 million bits of data from each radiometer to make certain that they had really found what they thought they had. The differences in temperature in the invisible microwaves are what traced the ripples in space once the computers had translated the electromagnetic radiation for human eyes.
In time, the discovery may strike people as commonplace, much as rockets and computers are today, except for one mystery. In a world increasingly wed to instant communication on virtually any subject, what kind of supernatural force led Smoot and his colleagues to keep their profound and thrilling secret to themselves for the entire year that it took them to verify what they thought they had found?
