A tight-knit, high-powered group of scientists and engineers
spent eight years building a satellite designed, in effect, to read
the genome of the universe. Launched in 2001, the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) reported its first results two
years later with a set of brilliant observations that added focus,
detail, and insight to our formerly fuzzy view of the cosmos.
For more than a year, the WMAP satellite hovered in the cold of
deep space, a million miles from Earth, in an effort to determine
whether the science of cosmology--the study of the origin and
evolution of the universe--has been on the right track for the past
two decades. What WMAP was looking for was a barely perceptible
pattern of hot and cold spots in the faint whisper of microwave
radiation left over from the Big Bang, the event that almost 14
billion years ago gave birth to all of space, time, matter, and
energy.
The pattern encoded in those microwaves holds the answers to
some of the great unanswered questions of cosmology: What is the
universe made of? What is its geometry? How much of it consists of
the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that continue to baffle
astronomers? How fast is it expanding? And did it undergo a period
of inflationary hyper-expansion at the very beginning? WMAP has now
given definitive answers to these mysteries.
On February 11, 2003, the team of researchers went public with
the results. Just some of their extraordinary findings: The
universe is 13.7 billion years old. The first stars--turned
on--when the universe was only 200 million years old, five times
earlier than anyone had thought. It is now certain that a
mysterious dark energy dominates the universe. Michael Lemonick,
who had exclusive access to the researchers as WMAP gathered its
data, here tells the full story of WMAP and its surprising
revelations. This book is both a personal and a scientific tale of
discovery. In its pages, readers will come to know the science of
cosmology and the people who, seventy-five years after we first
learned that the universe is expanding, deciphered some of its
deepest mysteries in the patterns of its oldest light.
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