Take a 360 Tour of COBE's Cosmic Baby Picture - YouTube - NASA Goddard - cosmology

The NASA COBE satellite operated from 1989-1993.It took the first baby picture of the universe,revealing slight temperature variations when the universe was just 380,000 years old.In the aftermath of the Big Bang,the universe was hotter and much smaller than it is now.As time went on,it cooled off and expanded to a huge extent,using the dark matter and energy residue of the Big Bang.This image shows the entire sky using four years of observations using COBE's Differential Microwave Radiometer.The central plane of our Milky Way galaxy runs across the middle and its center is marked by a white X.Red indicates hotter regions,blue colder.The fluctuations are very faint,varying by only one part in a 100,000 from the average temperature.They represent density variations in the early universe thought to have given rise to the structures that we see today.After stripping away foreground emmission arising from dust,hot gas and charged particles interacting with magnetic fields in our galaxy,COBE data revealed tiny variations in the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)-the oldest light in the universe-for the first time.*Cosmology is the study of the origin,evolution and structures of the universe.*Credit:NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt,Maryland*Image credit:NASA/COBE Science Team*Narrator:Thomas Essinger Hileman (NASA/GSFC)*Science Writer:Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)*Text by NASA Goddard and edited and augmented by Andrew Taylor