Astrophysicists have taken another major step in depicting the universe in its infancy. These results provide strong evidence that the universe is flat, with a large-scale geometry just like the Euclidean geometry everyone learns in high school. The dark energy is often referred to as the cosmological constant.
Inflation is the most popular cosmological theory describing the early history of the universe.
This is a good confirmation of the standard cosmology, and a large triumph for science, because we are talking about predictions made well before the experiment, about something as hard to know as the very early universe. The fact that these independent experiments give such similar results is the best indication that we are both getting the science right. The hot and cold spots vary by a few parts per 100,000 from the average background temperature of 2.7 Kelvin, or 454 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. The size of the spots in the thermal map told the cosmologists immediately one important parameter of the universe, its geometry or curvature. Both experiments saw spots clustered in a size range of about one degree across, indicating a flat universe like the ancient Greek geometer Euclid described more than 2,300 years ago.