They are talking now about a map assembled from 15 months' worth of data and showing an exquisite confirmation of our Big-Bang model for the origin and evolution of the Universe.
It details what is known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB - a faint glow of long wavelength radiation that pervades all of space.
Its precise configuration, visible in the new Planck data, is suggestive of a cosmos that is slightly older than previously thought - one that came into existence 13.82 billion years ago i.e an increase of about 50 million years on earlier calculations. This map also shows a slight more matter and slight less energy which is driving the cosmos apart at an accelerating rate.
They are saying that the Universe started in a hot, dense state in a tiny space then expanded and cooled. This supports the idea of INFLATION which suggests that in the very first moments of its existence the Universe opened up in an exponential manner faster than light itself.
This idea of Inflation turned to a breakthrough in the research of scientists and announced by a team used a telescope at South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch sky. This project is called BICEP2.
Inflation theory suggests that the cosmos experienced a massive growth spurt in its first trillionth of a trillions of a trillions of a second. Then Space continued to expand for about 14 billion years and still expanding.
Some scientists believe that this discovery of the inflationary epoch, opened a window on the mysterious dark energy, and gave some lights on how the infant Universe was transformed from mere quantum fluctuations into something of microscopic size after its birth and how space time expanded inŲ¤ridibly and rapidly, ballooning outward faster than the speed of light. That ancient light which began saturating the \universe hundreds of thousands years after the Big Bang. It is believed that before this time the |Universe was a sizzling fog of plasma and energy too hot for photons to travel freely.
The microwave background temperature is the same at different spots in the sky, and this would have remained a mystery if the cosmic inflation did not tell us that our whole sky came from this tiny region.
The spectacular expansion of the Universe during inflation produced gravitational waves which in turn generated th B modes according to the theory of the Smoking Gun which is a type of polarization in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background).
However scientists still do not know what is the substance that propelled inflation and till it is know the Universe remain a dark matter or what they scientifically called it Dark Energy.
Sami Cherkaoui
