Inside the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Team's Work
Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Charles L. Bennett, and members of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space mission that he led, recently won the Gruber Foundation's 2012 Cosmology Prize. Bennett and the 26-member team were recognized by the foundation for their transformative study of an ancient light dating back to the infant universe. So accurate and precise are WMAP's results that they form the foundation of the Standard Cosmological Model.
Transcript
00:00:10 Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Charles Bennett is the principal investigator of the groundbreaking Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe satellite space mission also known as W map using WAP Bennett and his team peered back 13.7 billion years at the most ancient light in the universe the objective of W map was really to pin down the universe to learn what it's made of what its shape is uh
00:00:37 uh what it's ages all all these fundamental properties about the universe and we knew that the way to do this was to make a map of the sky uh measuring something that we call the cosmic microwave background this is an Afterglow radiation left over from the uh very early universe so by measuring the Afterglow light in all directions of the sky we basically have a a picture of
00:01:06 of what the universe was like from this image what amounts to the infant universe's first baby picture Bennett and his team were able to determine the composition of the universe with unprecedented Precision it turns out that the ingredients of our universe are in some ways surprising uh we are made of atoms the earth is made of atoms almost everything we encounter is made
00:01:28 of atoms but atoms are only 4 . 6% of the universe the next bigger category is something called Dark Matter that's about 22% of the universe but the Lion Share of the universe about 73% is what we call dark energy and this is uh some kind of energy associated with an anti-gravity this uh is actually causing the universe's expansion to accelerate
00:01:56 that snapshot of the very young universe also revealed something intriguing about about its shape what is the shape of the space that we're in um it it is hard to imagine but we find that the universe is very close to what we call Flat wap's data also confirmed predictions about what happened within the universe's first trillionth of a second when it grew from subatomic to
00:02:20 astronomical in size in less time than it takes to Blink your eye a theory called inflation what we're talking about is space itself inflating the idea of inflation as strange as it sounds is that the Universe began with a presumably spontaneous Quantum fluctuation and this provides a mechanism to begin the universe and get the big bang expansion going thanks in
00:02:48 large part to Bennett and WAP scientists can now describe the universe's birth and first moments with the kind of precision once reserved for experiments conducted in Laboratories W map has uh made a transformational difference in our understanding of the universe