IT WAS still dark and bitterly cold when Paul Steinhardt met Anna Ijjas at her office in Harvard on 21 March. They had risen before dawn to watch researchers in Paris announce the first major results from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which has been mapping light from the universe's infancy since 2009.
Other missions have studied this light, aka the cosmic microwave background. But cosmologists the world over were itching to find out what Planck had seen because its detectors are at least three times as sharp as those on any previous satellite. It therefore provides the best-ever portrait of the universe not long after the big bang.
Would Planck lend weight to our leading theory of a well-mannered universe that underwent a precocious growth spurt known as inflation? Or would it force us back to the drawing board to understand our cosmic past?
"The overall conclusion ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
