VIOLENT bursts of particles that barely interact with matter could give us our best glimpse of the universe as it was mere moments after the big bang.
In recent days, a flood of new data released from NASA’s WMAP satellite has left cosmologists poring over the finer details of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the radiation from about 400,000 years after the big bang. The CMB is made of photons that have travelled mostly unimpeded since the time when the universe became transparent to radiation. Before this point, the universe was an opaque soup of electrons and protons that had not yet cooled enough to…
