cosmic microwave background

  • Cosmic Microwave Background

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 32, Number 2. Just recently, it was reported in the news that Arno Penzias had passed away at the age of 90. Penzias, along with his colleague Robert Wilson, discovered the birth of the universe.  In the 1940s, There wasn’t any direct evidence of the so-called Big Bang that many astronomers…

  • The Expanding Universe

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 31, Number 4. This is part 3 of a 5-part series on the Universe (The Visible Universe, The Dark Universe, The Expanding Universe, The Microscopic Universe, and The Multiverse). For a long time, people thought that the universe was static and everlasting. It was here. It had always been here. And…

  • A Map of the Universe

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 15. Earlier this year (2022), I posted an article about the history of the universe. I followed with a second article about the shape and future of the universe. The universe is big (really big). Estimates place the diameter of the visible universe at 92 billion light years. It…

  • Geometry, Omega, and the Universe

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 12. Way back when we were in high school, many of us studied geometry. We learned about triangles, rectangles, and parallel lines. We found that the sum of the angles in a triangle equals 180o. What we didn’t know then is that this geometry was first described by Euclid…

  • The History of the Universe

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 6. This is a story of the Universe. The Universe is big, really big. It also has an interesting history, although one where lots of things happened in the first three minutes or so before everything settled down to a 13.8-billion-year timeline stretching up to the present. I guess…