Sharpest-Ever Baby Pics of the Universe Reveal Its Oldest Light

It’s hard to picture the universe in its infancy. The middle-aged cosmos now stretches across 93 billion light-years, holding up to two trillion galaxies and more than 200 billion trillion stars. But in the beginning, things were simple. As a baby, the universe was essentially a hot, dense soup of particles, which has been expanding and cooling over billions of years. A telescope perched in northern Chile has peered back at the early universe, capturing the afterglow of the Big Bang that radiated throughout the cosmos. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) released the sharpest images yet of the universe’s first light, capturing the material that would later form the earliest galaxies and stars during the cosmic infancy. The new images, to be presented at an upcoming meeting of the American Physical Society, date back to when the universe was only 380,000 years old. The cosmos is now a more mature 13.8 billion years old, which means the light had to travel more than 13 billion years t ... Read full article.