(Amar)
The big bang theory might be true of our galaxy (maybe the cosmic condom broke) but I doubt that it's true of the entire universe.
The Big Bang far exceeds our galaxy and its impact is upon all the literally billions of galaxies we now observe or suspect are out there.
We are seeing back in time to almost the beginning through telescopes due to the distances involved. In fact I read an article about a week or so ago that claims we are actually able observe real time conditions all the way to a few hundred million years and maybe less after the moment on the Big Bang.
Perhaps this is what you are referring to Amar in an essay right out of today's paper.
Knowing the Universe in Detail (Except for That Pesky 96 Percent of It)
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: October 24, 2006
Hardly anyone remembers now, but 1991 was a bad year for the Big Bang.
Astronomers were having more and more difficulty reconciling their models of the explosion that gave birth and impetus to the expanding cosmos with the structure of the modern universe, in particular the discovery of strings of clusters and so-called superclusters of galaxies going hundreds of millions of light-years across the sky.
There was a rash of articles in prestigious journals like Science and even this newspaper saying that major elements of the model, or even the Big Bang itself, might have to be junked. “Big Bang Blown to Bits,” read one headline I remember.
I took all this rather personally because the publication of my first book, which was about cosmology, coincided with the appearance of these headlines. The cosmic jig was up, and I wasn’t getting invited onto any talk shows.
But in April 1992, George Smoot from the University of California, Berkeley, announced that the NASA satellite Cosmic Background Explorer, or Cobe, had detected faint irregularities in a bath of microwaves that pervade space.
The microwaves are presumed to be cooling radiation from the original fireball, and the splotches were the right size to one day grow into giant clusters of galaxies.
“If you are religious, it is like looking at God,” Dr. Smoot said.
This month Dr. Smoot and John Mather, of the Goddard Space Flight Center, the head Cobe scientist, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. There was much talk that Cobe had marked a turning point, the beginning of a “golden age,” in which cosmology went from a collection of vague ideas to a precision science.
Indeed, subsequent observations have parsed the meaning of those lumps, allowing cosmologists to converge on a remarkably detailed picture of the universe. The Big Bang, they now say, happened 13.7 billion years ago, plus or minus 150,000 years. That is a far cry from the days when some astronomers were ready to go to the mat over whether it was 10 billion or 20 billion years ago and when others shrugged and said a factor of two was pretty good in cosmology.
Moreover, they now say, ordinary atomic matter of the kind that makes up you, me and the stars is 4 percent of the cosmos; dark matter that floats as gravitational glue between the stars and galaxies is 20 percent; and dark energy, which is apparently accelerating the cosmic expansion, pushing the galaxies faster and faster apart, is 76 percent, plus or minus 2 percent.
You might wonder just exactly what kind of triumph “precision cosmology” represents when 96 percent of the universe is unknown dark stuff. Stars and people we know about. But the best guess for dark matter is that it is some kind of subatomic particle that will be discovered someday.
Dark energy was a complete surprise. How often do you toss a handful of gravel into the air and the rocks speed up as they leave your hand and disappear into the sky? The leading contender for an explanation is a fudge factor representing the repulsive force of empty space that Einstein danced in and out of his equations 75 or so years ago. But no one really knows.
Apparently we now know enough to say that the universe is precisely “preposterous,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a physicist and blogger at the California Institute of Technology. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, likes to say, “We know much, but we understand little.”
Critics of the Big Bang mutter darkly that all these mysterious elements in the equation are reminiscent of the epicycles, circles upon circles added to the orbits of the planets back in the Middle Ages to maintain the appearance that they were circling the Earth. Sometimes I wonder if the astrophysicists have been too glib for their own good. By adding dark energy and dark matter on top of black holes, they have overextended the “dark” brand just when we need a fresh dose of wonder.
But I didn’t buy the death of the Big Bang 15 years ago, and I don’t buy the criticism now. Particle physicists had already predicted the existence of extra “dark” particles before cosmologists put them to work. And antigravity, the dark energy, in precisely the amount discovered by two rival teams of astronomers in 1998, turned out to be the ingredient that made the Big Bang models finally work. Nobody had a chance to jiggle the numbers.
Sometimes the game comes to you. It was by following the light that cosmologists were led into the dark.
Still, the universe can always use a new Copernicus or Einstein. Thanks to the Cobe scientists and their successors, these are boom times for the Big Bang. After all, 96 percent of the universe is still waiting to be found.
Now I will look for that article on the age. I think I read it in Live Science
