CMB

In 1964, Penzias and Wilson found persistent noise in a Bell Labs antenna they could not explain. It turned out to be the afterglow of the Big Bang. Here is how they found it.

A complete primer on dark matter — Vera Rubin's galaxy rotation curves, gravitational lensing, CMB, WIMP and axion candidates, what experiments have ruled out, the MOND debate, primordial black holes, and where the science stands in 2026.

The Big Bang explained: evidence from Hubble's law, the CMB, and primordial element abundances, plus the timeline of cosmic history and the universe's fate.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is thermal radiation from the universe's first 380,000 years, now cooled to about 2.7255 K. Its tiny ripples seeded every galaxy.

Cosmic inflation is a proposed burst of exponential expansion in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, stretching space by a factor of at least about 10²⁶. It explains why the universe is flat and uniform and where galaxies came from. Its best-known direct test, a 2014 claim by BICEP2, turned out to be dust.