THOSE crazy cosmologists. They have dreamed up some wild ideas about our universe – filling it with oceans of invisible matter, invoking a kind of cosmic antigravity, and describing an ancient cataclysm called inflation that stretched out space. It sounded like the product of an overactive imagination. Until, earlier this year, we found that they were, quite startlingly, right.
Using a satellite positioned millions of kilometres from Earth called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists built up a mottled map of the sky showing the temperature variations in microwave radiation from the young universe (see picture). From this pattern of…
