From Mica
A Snapshot of the Early Universe: The Cosmic Microwave Background
If you look between all of the stars and all of the galaxies, and you get outside of the Earth's atmosphere, and even outside the glow of the gas and dust in our own galaxy, you would see that everywhere the sky glows at a temperature of about 3 degrees above absolute zero. This is the cosmic microwave background, and it represents a snapshot of the aftermath of the Big Bang. In this talk, I'll summarize how it was discovered, I'll describe how it came to be a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, and I'll tell you some of the very important things we've learned about our Universe from studying it.
Media
Slides (PDF format)
Audio Recording (mp3 file)
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