Frontiers of Cosmology Cosmology was born when humans first gazed at the night skies and attempted to understand the workings of the universe. Guided only by their eyes and their imaginations, they constructed elaborate myths about the starry sky. Twentieth-century progress in cosmology has been marked by advances in technology and theory. Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe , Penzias' and Wilson's observation of cosmic background radiation , the detection of the elementar y particles that populated the very early universe-all were made possible by increasingly powerful instruments and flashes of human brilliance.
Technology continues to expand the frontiers of cosmology.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed gas clouds in the cosmic voids and beautiful images of fledgling galaxies formed when the universe was just one billion years old. It's being employed in efforts to estimate the age of the universe. A number of powerful land-based telescopes, recently built or under construction, will help cosmologists construct a map of the universe. The Keck Telescope in Hawaii has revealed the elusive brown dwarfs . Particle accelerators and detectors continue to yield new information about the fundamental nature of matter.