• DOI:10.1038/35010035
• Corpus ID: 4412370

A flat Universe from high-resolution maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation

@article{Bernardis2000AFU,
  title={A flat Universe from high-resolution maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation},
  author={Paolo Bernardis and P. A. R. Ade and James J. Bock and J. Richard Bond and Julian Borrill and Andrea Boscaleri and Kim Coble and Brendan P. Crill and Giancarlo de Gasperis and Philip C. Farese and Pedro G. Ferreira and Ken Ganga and M. Giacometti and Eric Hivon and Viktor V. Hristov and Anna Iacoangeli and Andrew H. Jaffe and Andrew E. Lange and Lorenzo Martinis and Silvia Masi and P. V. Mason and Philip Daniel Mauskopf and Alessandro Melchiorri and L. Miglio and Thomas Montroy and Calvin Barth Netterfield and Enzo Pascale and Francesco Piacentini and Dmitry Pogosyan and Simon Prunet and S. M. Rao and Giuseppe Romeo and John E. Ruhl and Francesco Scaramuzzi and D. Sforna and Nicola Vittorio},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2000},
  volume={404},
  pages={955-959}
}

• P. Bernardis, P. Ade, +33 authors N. Vittorio
• Published 27 April 2000
• Physics
• Nature

The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73 K cosmic microwave background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the microwave background in the form of small anisotropies in its temperature. These anisotropies contain information about basic cosmological parameters, particularly the total energy density and curvature of the Universe. Here we report the first images of resolved structure in the microwave background anisotropies over a significant part of the sky. Maps at four frequencies clearly distinguish the microwave background from foreground emission. We compute the angular power spectrum of the microwave background, and find a peak at Legendre multipole lpeak = (197 ± 6), with an amplitude ΔT200 = (69 ± 8) µK. This is consistent with that expected for cold dark matter models in a flat (euclidean) Universe, as favoured by standard inflationary models.