Subscribe for free email updates . Click here to sign up, or log in . Jeffrey Peterson, a Carnegie Mellon astrophysicist and the lead scientist on the Viper project, announced the findings on Dec. 18 in Paris, France at the Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics. The biennial meeting attracts the world's foremost astronomers and astrophysicists. This delicate balance is hard to understand unless inflation theory, or something akin to it, is correct.
Viper is used to make images of the faint structure, an anisotropy, seen in the sky.
Astrophysicists widely accept that if the expansion of the universe were slowing, the glowing clouds of gas observed with Viper would be, in astronomical terms, relatively close by and would measure as much as one-half degree of arc across the sky. The newly released measurements indicate that the universe has just such an escape velocity, Peterson stressed. The anisotropy measurement is just a small part of the data collected from the telescope, which provides a snapshot of the universe as it was 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the cataclysmic event that set in motion the forces that created today's universe. Previous cosmic background telescopes have been smaller than Viper and have not been able to focus in fine enough detail to measure the clouds as viper can. However, the CARA group's work with these earlier prototypes was critical to the new discovery.