New results just released from the WMAP probe

Standard Toaster

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/03/05/the-universe-is-1373-12-billion-years-old/

WMAP Results
A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:
1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.
2) The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.
3) The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.
4) The Universe is flat.
5) The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

We occupy a razor thin slice of reality.

There are other important things that have come from the WMAP data, and if you’re interested, you can read all about them on the WMAP site and in the professional journal papers.
But if you only want to peruse the results I’ve highlighted here, that’s fine too. But remember this, and remember it well: you are living in a unique time. For the first time in all of human history, we can look up at the sky, and when it looks back down on us it reveals its secrets. We are the very first humans to be able to do this… and we have the entire future of the Universe ahead of us.

Amazing stuff. Pity the media will largely ignore this.

FTA: "The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong."


LOL

Standard Toaster

Some more info from the results from newscientist

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13414-universe-submerged-in-a-sea-of-chilled-neutrinos.html



WMAP measures the composition of the universe by observing the cosmic microwave background, radiation that was emitted just 380,000 years after the big bang. Dark matter and atoms have become less dense as the volume of the universe has increased over time. Photons and neutrino particles also lose energy as the universe expands, but dark energy now dominates the universe even though it was a tiny contributor 13.7 billion years ago (Illustration: NASA/WMAP Science Team)