The European Space Agency (ESA) revealed on Thursday that our Universe is 80 to 100 million years older than previously thought, via a detailed map of the most ancient light in the cosmos.

ESA’s Planck satellite took a 50-million pixel, all sky snapshot of the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Director general of the ESA, Jean-Jacques Dordain said at a press converse during the unveiling of the data, that:

This is a giant leap in our understanding of the origins of the Universe. This image is the closet one yet of the Big Bang. You are looking 13,8 billion years ago.

The dotted pixels in blue and brown represent small fluctuations in temperature on the oval map. The image depicts Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) or relic radiation 380 000 years after the Big Bang, when the newly formed Universe started cooling down.

According to the data, the Universe is expanding at a much slower rate than predicted, which lead scientists to adjust the age to 13,8 billion years. The data also showed that “normal matter”, which makes up plants, humans, planets, stars and galaxies comprised 4,9% of the Universe – up from the previous estimation of 4,5%.

George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the university of Cambridge told journalists, “we’ve discovered a fundamental truth about the universe.”

Cosmologist, Carlo Bacciagalupi:

This is the first time that man can look with such clearness at the origin of the Universe, in which we see the impact of forms of matter and energy still unknown today.

The data gathered by Planck left a few questions to be answered around the major constituents of the Universe which “new physics” may need to explain.

[Source: GlobalPost]