Astronomers Detect First Split-Second of the Universe
By Ker Than

Scientists announced today new evidence supporting the theory that the infant universe expanded from subatomic to astronomical size in a fraction of a second after its birth.

The finding is based on new results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched in 2001 to measure the temperature of radiant heat left over from the Big Bang, which is the theoretical beginning to the universe.

This radiation is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and it is the oldest light in the universe.

Using WMAP data, researchers announced in 2003 that they had pieced together a very detailed snapshot of the universe as it was about 400,000 years ago, and that they had determined things like its age, composition and development.

The previous data showed that the universe was about 13.7 billion years old. It also revealed that it wasn't until about 200 million years after the Big Bang that conditions were cool enough for the first stars to form. Scientists were also able to conclude that the universe is composed of about 4 percent real matter, about 23 percent dark matter, and about 73 percent dark energy. Nobody actually nows what dark matter or dark energy are, however.

The new WMAP observations, announced at a NASA press conference today, reveal what the universe was like in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. From the microwave background, researchers teased out a new signal called the "polarization signal."

"This new signal is roughly 100 times weaker than the signal we analyzed three years ago and about a billion times less than the radiant warmth we feel from the Sun," said Lyman Page, a WMAP team member from Princeton University.

The researchers collected observations of this polarization signal to create a map of the early universe, allowing them to test a sub-theory within the Big Bang theory, called "inflation."

Inflation theory states that the universe underwent a rapid expansion immediately following the Big Bang.

"During this growth spurt, a tiny region, likely no larger than a marble, grew in a trillionth of a second to become larger than the visible universe," said WMAP researcher David Spergel, also from Princeton University.

The new observations reveal that the early expansion wasn't smooth, with some regions expanding faster than others.

"We find that density fluctuations on the 1- to 10-billion-light-year scale are larger than density fluctuations on the hundred-million-light-year scale," Spergel said. "That is just what inflation theory predicts."

These fluctuations are thought to have led to clumping of matter that allowed the formation of galaxies.

Brian Greene, a physicist from Columbia University who wasn't involved in the research, called the new findings "spectacular" and "stunning."

"A major question that people have asked for decades is where do stars and galaxies come from? The answer coming from WMAP data supports the idea that quantum fluctuations are the answer," Greene said. "WMAP's data supports the notion that galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanism writ large across the sky."

The new findings brings humanity closer to answering one of its oldest questions, that of where we come from, Greene said.

"WMAP certainly doesn't answer this question, but its data is taking us one giant step closer to the answer by giving us a precise quantitative look at the universe's earliest fraction of a second," Greene said. "It's a tiny window of time, but it's a critical one in our quest to learn what happened at time zero itself."

The new findings have been submitted to Astrophysical Journal.

Article | Source: Space.com

The first trillionth of a second! Or, put another way the first 0.000000000001 of a second. That's some split second.

The Universe expanded and heated greatly within the first millionth of a second. It reach up to 10000000 K, and cooled back down to 100000K in about a 1/100000000 of a second

Wow, it's hard to wrap your head around, but it's very interesting.

How do they come to this kind of conclusion from studying a "polarization signal" that is a billion times less than the warmth we feel from the sun? And what ever happened to the theory that nothing can travel faster than light?? I'd say inflation from a marble size to larger than the visable universe is quite the leap from light speed.

This is the problem with the inflation theory, light horizons. Everything in the universe is pretty much uniform from observation (distribution of galaxies, carecteristics, composition) but light horizons exist. Meaning that light from parts of the universe has yet to meet other parts of the universe. We cannot see the entire universe due to this.

I dont buy the 'big bang' theory. At least in its current state. It fits only in portions of the big picture, and fails miserably in others.

I had trouble with this one too, and I have read quite a bit about quantum physics and relativity. It wasn't until I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time some number of years ago that my mind melted enough to wrap itself around the idea. You see, relativity states that nothing with mass may travel at or above the speed of light through normal space. The marble sized universe was not made up of matter, yet. The marble was the universe, and all of space. It was space itself that expanded. Remember, the marble did not expand into space, there was none beyond the marble. Therefore, its size was of no particular importance. How can one determine the size of anything with no point of reference? Whatever the starting point's size, it expanded into what we call the universe today. The result of that expansion changed the energy of that space, thus, E=MC^2, the energy became matter and antimatter. After mutual annhilation, there was "normal" matter left (for the most part) as the early distribution was not entirely uniform. If one looks at the distribution of galaxies today, and the cosmic background radiation, it becomes apparent.

Whatever lay beyond the edge of that original sphere is meaningless in that no information may ever be transmitted or received to or from there. Hawking explained this, "time cone" well in his book

You say that space itself expanded, yet you infer that it had energy in it to begin with. E=Mc^2, energy is equal to mass x c^2. Energy is mass and vice versa. It still violates the currently accepted top speed of the universe.

I've read A Brief History of Time, and while Hawking has a good grip on his theories, he has been proven wrong before. I recall a thread on him loosing a bet about a theory.

There are other holes in currently accepted big bang theory. Super cooling of the resulting matter from the big bang, only for it to warm up again (by unknown means) enough for movement of the atoms to create the first stars, sounds a little far fetched. The production of anti-matter along with matter is an unnecssary by-product of a previous hole in the theory (it was speculated that if all the matter were just matter, all that would have been created were black holes. So anti-matter was introduced to the theory to compensate, before it was discovered from what i remember). Casual contact of all matter at one point in time is a necessity of the theory (to explain uniformity), which does not seem possible due to light-horizons.

IMO i think its time that other big bang theories are brought to public attention, there are other theories. Due to the fact these theories have differing ideas, science is reluctant to allow publishing of them. If you'd like to look into it more I'd suggest reading Faster than the Speed of Light.

The energy was like the zero point energy we are just learning about today.
No, it does not, because we are not talking about anything that is traveling through space, it is space that is expanding.
It was with Roger Penrose, and it had to do with black holes, I forget the details of the bet except that Stephen owed Roger a subsccription to Penthouse magazine! (that's just weird, sorry Stephen)

Granted, there are many theories and working hypothesis out there right now. That is the beauty of the scientific method. Somewhere, in all of the piles of research and millions of degrees of heat generated by all of the calories burned by scientific minds considering the answers to questions that promise, at this time, only more questions, lie the answers to this greatest of mysteries.

i understand what you mean Ryk saying space is expanding so space as a whole is moving faster than the speed of light but anything within space cannot?

Mostly correct, although I don't think a velocity can be assigned to the expansion of space. To speak of velocities, one has to measure that velocity relative to something. I really don't know the right way to put this, but if there is nothing to measure against, what difference is there between the marble-sized universe and the one we know of today?

Question: If they haven't detected what happened before this split second, how do they know that it really is just a split second after at all?

Science starts with theory, from theoretical basis (educated guesses), and then tests those theories by observation. The observations from the WMAP satellite fit where they theorised the universe was at one trillionth of a second old. This does not imply that the theory is correct however, should anything be found that proves it false the theory is rejected and science moves on.

I dont think there is a theory on what it was prior to that. I'm not sure if it could be detected at all.

This is very interesting.

I agree with virtually everything you sa except one thing, this information DOES imply that the theory is correct. However it doesn't prove it. Accept in the case of where a mathematical proof is available (in which case it is a Law not a theory anyway) it is almost impossibe to prove a scientific theory right but very simple to prove it wrong. A good theory will make predictions. If these predictions are incorrect then the theory falls, it they are correct the theory survives. It is possible for observations to support more than one competeing theory.

For what it is worth:

Explanation: The Universe is expanding gradually now. But its initial expansion was almost impossibly rapid as it likely grew from quantum scale fluctuations in a trillionth of a second. In fact, this cosmological scenario, known as Inflation, is now reported to be further quantified by an analysis of three years of data from the WMAP spacecraft. WMAP's instruments detect the cosmic microwave background radiation - the afterglow light from the early Universe. WMAP's amazing success in exploring the first trillionth of a second and favoring specific inflationary scenarios lies in its ability to make unprecedented, precise measurements of the properties of the microwave background. The subtle properties are distilled from conditions in the early Universe and related to its first moments of existence. Schematically, this diagram traces the 13.7 billion year (plus a trillionth of a second ...) history of the Universe from the quantum scale to the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, and WMAP.

APOD

What I'm curious about finding out is the future of the universe, will we continue to expand, or is the weakening of the so-called Dark energygoing to result in a universal collapse.

The most accepted theory is that the universe will expand, and slowly slow down in expansion as mass "thins out".

Yeah but that's only if what is happening at this very moment continues, recent evidence of wekening Dark Energy has cast some doubt on the theory, if Dark energy weakens too far then the mass of the universe may be enough to pull the galaxies back together, scientists really don't know one way or the other.

The End of the Universe - big crunch or big bang?
Scientists working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Ontario, Canada have finally revealed the fate of the Universe ...

They have managed to calculate the mass of the elusive neutrino particle and have concluded that the combined mass of the colossal amount of neutrinos in our universe is not enough to halt a universal expansion. The universe is therefore destined to expand forever until it becomes a cold, dark place devoid of all signs of life.

astronomytoday.com

You missed the update:

Update to article:
The Ontario research is not a final say, however. A new force called “dark energy” is known to push galaxy clusters apart and its composition is unknown. That too could affect the universe’s fate. In addition, astrophysical constants like the fine structure constant (alpha) slowly change over time. At some point, a constant like α or some particle’s mass may decay past a critical point and universal matter would disintegrate. Whatever happens will not happen during our lifetimes or our childrens’ and thus there is no need to worry – even though scientists can create a black hole capable of swallowing Earth.

Basically if Dark energy wekens then the expansion effect may slow or even stop, then the question becomes will it pull back together or remain mostly stagnant.

A link
I tried to find what you mentioned but all I could find was the"out with a wimper" theory.

Zandore, the update is actually on the page you linked to, but the page doesn't always load correctly. If you click on another page on the astronomytoday site and then hit your back button you should see the whole page (it works for me any way)

It did not work for me.

Try pasting this link:

http://www.astronomytoday.com/cosmology/universe.html

Its at the bottom of the page.

Here is another very good link,

Ripples at the Edge of the Universe

This is what I find there:

Scientists working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Ontario, Canada have finally revealed the fate of the Universe ...

They have managed to calculate the mass of the elusive neutrino particle and have concluded that the combined mass of the colossal amount of neutrinos in our universe is not enough to halt a universal expansion. The universe is therefore destined to expand forever until it becomes a cold, dark place devoid of all signs of life.

The full article:

The End of the Universe - big crunch or big bang?
Scientists working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Ontario, Canada have finally revealed the fate of the Universe ...

They have managed to calculate the mass of the elusive neutrino particle and have concluded that the combined mass of the colossal amount of neutrinos in our universe is not enough to halt a universal expansion. The universe is therefore destined to expand forever until it becomes a cold, dark place devoid of all signs of life.

What is a neutrino anyway?
Technically a neutrino is a lepton with zero charge, half spin and an extremely small mass that only interacts with other particles through weak interaction. Its existence was originally postulated by Wolfgang Pauli to account for the missing energy in beta decay. It is thought that neutrinos make up a large portion of the dark matter in our universe. Neutrinos come in one of three types: electron, muon or tau. The physicists working on the project were trying to explain the problem of the missing solar neutrinos. The nuclear reactions fueling the Sun emit a vast quantity of electron neutrinos, but experiments find that only a fraction of the expected amount of electron neutrinos reach Earth. The experiments at Sudbury proved that neutrinos can oscillate between the different types, accounting for the discrepancy in the amount of electron neutrinos. This interesting discovery is far-reaching in that in implies that the direct evidence for solar neutrino transformation also indicates that neutrinos have mass and, by combining this with previous information, it is possible to set an upper limit on the sum of the known neutrino masses. According to Scott Tremaine, professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, "This is the final clue we need to determine the fate of the Universe".

Missing Mass
In order for the universe to halt expansion and eventually contract into a "Big Crunch," the mass of the universe must be above a certain value. The stars and galaxies in the universe detectable by our telescopes and instruments only account for a small fraction of this total mass, an assertion clearly supported by indirect evidence e.g. the rotation of galaxies. Therefore neutrinos were thought to make up a large fraction of the dark matter in the universe. But with an upper limit on their mass, the total mass of the universe cannot reach the critical level so our universe will surely expand into infinity with all its remaining consequences.

Consequences
If the "Big Crunch" model of the Universe is discarded, the universe is predicted to expand into a diffuse, dark nothingness during the consecutive Degenerate, Black Hole and Dark eras. Planets will detach from stars that will in turn evaporate from galaxies. The proton will decay, all stars will run out of fuel and be engulfed by black holes that will radiate all their masses and leave the Universe a vast, cold, sterile place.

Update to article:
The Ontario research is not a final say, however. A new force called “dark energy” is known to push galaxy clusters apart and its composition is unknown. That too could affect the universe’s fate. In addition, astrophysical constants like the fine structure constant (alpha) slowly change over time. At some point, a constant like α or some particle’s mass may decay past a critical point and universal matter would disintegrate. Whatever happens will not happen during our lifetimes or our childrens’ and thus there is no need to worry – even though scientists can create a black hole capable of swallowing Earth.

Author: Marc Delehanty

Source: http://www.astronomytoday.com/cosmology/universe.html