Scientists trace the origins of the cosmos to the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago. Russian mathematician Aleksandr Friedmann and Belgian astronomer George Lemaître proposed this model in the 1920s, drawing from Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
The Big Bang theory is widely accepted today — but it wasn't always that way, says Lake Effect astronomy contributor Jean Creighton.
"Until my lifetime, really, cosmology was something that everybody could sit around a coffee or a beer and discuss, 'What kind of universe do you like?' .... Because there was no data to ground to differentiate between a good idea and a better idea," she says.
With more data and improved technology, astronomers' methods to test their theories also improved. In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson used the Holmdel Horn Antenna to discover an important piece of evidence: an "afterglow" of light and heat left over from the Big Bang.
Known as cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), this afterglow fills the entire universe. In 1978, Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
"As the universe expanded, that hot, hot light — light [which] has very short wavelengths — got stretched out into microwave wavelengths," Creighton explains. "So that was our first real clue that, okay, the Big Bang is a thing."
In 2009, the European Space Agency launched the Planck spacecraft to map these CMBR microwaves. To this day, scientists continue to discover new data as the explore the origins of the universe.
"That's the exciting thing about cosmology — that you continuously learn more and you get a better understanding," Creighton says.
To learn more about the clues astronomers have used to understand the origins and evolution of the universe, you can check out "Birth of the Universe" at Manfred Olson Planetarium. The event will be held on Jan. 30 and every Friday in February, from 7 to 8 p.m.
Ahead of that event, you can listen to Jean Creighton's conversation with Lake Effect's Audrey Nowakowski above.
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