Name: Scientists Capture the First Light from the Big Bang
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Feast your eyes on one of the most important images in all of cosmology: a picture of the first light from the Big Bang.

Scientists now have a detailed image of the entire universe in its infancy.

Scientists Capture the First Light from the Big Bang

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Feast your eyes on one of the most important images in all of cosmology: a picture of the first light from the Big Bang.

Scientists now have a detailed image of the entire universe in its infancy.

Space & Flight

Scientists Capture the First Light from the Big BangPublished: December 7, 2021Tana Joseph: So this image that I'm looking at here is one of the most exciting images in astronomy and cosmology. And it's an image of the cosmic microwave background radiation. So basically the Big Bang happened and this is the first light that we see that came from that event, that basically birthed our universe.Narrator: Thanks to Planck, scientists now have a detailed image of the entire universe in its infancy.Giorgio Savini: The best analogy of looking at the first slides of the instrument, I think is like seeing your child being born.Katie Mack: We can see the light from the time when the whole universe was on fire, when the universe was not empty space but a roiling, churning plasma.Larry Gladney: We can look back to within 380,000 years after The Big Bang. Before that, we can't see any light because it was all absorbed by the universe itself.Narrator: It may not be an image of the Big Bang itself, but the cosmic microwave background is powerful evidence that it did happen.Hiranya Peiris: I couldn't wipe the smile from my face for about a week.Narrator: Planck gives us details of the earliest moments of the universe and at first glance, all it sees is an almost featureless glow.Tana Joseph: So no galaxies, no stars, jut this glowing ball of plasma and the radiation reflects that actually because when we first looked at it, this radiation was incredibly smooth.Narrator: But Planck's highly sensitive detectors can pick up even the slightest variations. Variations we see as different shades of blue, red and yellow in this iconic false color image.Larry Gladney: Before, all we could see is a uniform glow. Now, we can actually see small patches on the sky, differences in temperature, which are really incredibly tiny.Narrator: The variations are less than 100,000th of a degree. But they suggest that the primordial fireball was not perfectly uniform and these variations must have come from somewhere, pointing to a profound truth. The Big Bang was not actually the beginning.

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