A team of researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has recently published the most detailed images to date of the universe in its earliest stage, a discovery that marks a significant advance in understanding cosmic origins. These images, obtained after collecting and analyzing data from light that has traveled for more than 13 billion years, will be officially presented at the annual conference of the American Physical Society.
Thanks to the capabilities of the ACT, located high in the Chilean Andes, scientists have been able to visualize the universe as it was when it was only 380,000 years old, a fraction of time that could be compared to the first few hours of a newborn in a human context. We are witnessing the first steps toward the formation of the primordial stars and galaxies, explained Suzanne Staggs, ACT director and professor of physics at Princeton University.
What sets these new images apart is the ability to see, in addition to the distribution of light and darkness, the polarization of light with unprecedented resolution, allowing researchers to extract information about the movement of primordial gases.
The Cosmic Microwave Background in High Definition
The images obtained by the ACT significantly improve upon observations made more than a decade ago by the Planck space telescope. ACT has five times the resolution of Planck and greater sensitivity, explained Sigurd Naess, a researcher at the University of Oslo and lead author of one of the papers accompanying the data release. This higher resolution has allowed scientists to directly observe the polarization of light emitted in the infancy of the universe, a phenomenon that provides information about gravitational influences in different regions of the primordial cosmos.
The new images reveal with extraordinary detail the fluctuations in the density and velocity of hydrogen and helium gases that populated the early universe. If before we could see where the primordial structures were located, we can now also understand how they moved, Staggs added. This phenomenon is similar to how the study of Earth’s tides allows us to infer the gravitational influence of the Moon.
These new findings reinforce the standard model of cosmology, subjecting it to rigorous tests that have confirmed its validity. We have analyzed our data for signs of new physics, but so far, we have not found significant deviations from the accepted model, said David Spergel, a physicist at Princeton University and one of the leaders in analyzing the ACT data.
The researchers have also measured the extent of the observable universe with greater precision, estimating it to be nearly 50 billion light-years in all directions. Additionally, they have calculated that the total mass contained in this vast cosmos amounts to 1,900 “zetta-suns,” which corresponds to approximately two trillion trillion suns. Of that amount, only a fraction corresponds to the ordinary matter we know; the rest is divided between the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, whose nature remains a challenge for modern physics.
The ACT operated in Chile from 2007 until its closure in 2022, when the data collection phase was completed. Now, efforts are focused on the Simons Observatory, a new facility located at the same site and designed to conduct even more detailed observations of the early cosmos. The ACT data has been made publicly available through NASA’s LAMBDA archive, facilitating future research.
This project has been made possible through financial support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, as well as Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The scientific collaboration involves more than 160 researchers from 65 institutions worldwide, who continue to unravel the secrets of the infant universe.
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