Click here for the official LBNL Science News Story. 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. However, only about 5 percent of its mass and energy is comprised of ordinary matter - the stuff of which the Earth, the stars and humans are made. The dark energy often is 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. Inflationary theories refer to an event that happened an infinitesimally small fraction of a second after the big bang, an explosive event that most astronomers believe kicked off our universe some 10-20 billion years ago. At that moment, the expanding universe underwent a rapid inflation that smoothed out the matter and energy. Only afterwards did pressure waves or sound waves imprint detailed information about the nascent universe on the clumps of hot, dense matter created during inflation.