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Cosmic Microwave Background: Google Earth Style

Posted by Unknown on from the find-the-aliens dept.

iDuck writes "Damien George, of Cambridge University, has created a 3D visualization of the latest data from the Planck mission. Using WebGL, it lets you spin and zoom a 3D model of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and select different wavelength bands."

7 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Microwave by Tator+Tot · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's funny how the Cosmic Microwave Background looks like the inside of our work microwave.

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  2. Projected wrong? by hrieke · · Score: 2

    Shouldn't it be like a star atlas, projected as if we're standing on the earth, looking out, vs. how it appears now; as a globe?

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    1. Re:Projected wrong? by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Especially for something that you can't see with your naked eyes, what makes a projection "wrong"? Do you also complain whenever you see a Mercator projection (or other sphere-projected-to-a-rectangle) map? The external spherical projection makes it easy to visualize large-angular-field structures along with small, which are awkward to view from "inside" (without really strong/funky perspective distortion).

    2. Re:Projected wrong? by Baloroth · · Score: 2

      Sort of. It's the edge of the actually visible universe: it's light from the moment (well, it wasn't a moment exactly, but it was nearly instantaneous on the scale of the universe) when photons stopped being scattered by matter, and started free-flowing (this is known as the "surface of last scattering"). Since some points were slightly hotter than others, they produced slightly different distribution of photon energies. Black body radiation (which is what the background radiation is) follows a well-defined curve of photon energies, so from the photons we observe today, we can deduce the differences in temperature in different spots then. The usual picture is of that temperature difference, after scientists have processed out all the foreground noise.

      Technically, the "edge of the universe" is a bit further away than that, but we can't see that far, since light from that period of time was absorbed by all the ionized gas that filled the universe.

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  3. Lithium by percy69 · · Score: 2

    Awesome. But I still can't find the missing lithium.

  4. Like looking at the bottom of a swimming pool... by dmgxmichael · · Score: 2

    Every time I see a picture of the cosmic background radiation I can't help but be reminded of the patterns sunlight makes on the bottom of a swimming pool. How much of what we are seeing is a glimpse into the origin of the universe and how much is distortion introduced by various sources?

  5. Re:Beachball of God. by Reverand+Dave · · Score: 2

    How about all of them. Have fun with that.

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