Anthonares

In my undergraduate cosmology class my professor introduced this satellite as having brought about quantitative cosmolgy. While that’s probably just a bit of an exaggeration, this little craft definitely revolutionized the science. Prior to the launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) (and to a much smaller degree its predecessor, COBE), cosmology, the study of the evolution of the universe, was a mess of theories and ages. But after a series of papers published in 2003 detailing the first year of data collection from WMAP, the universe suddenly had a definite age, 13.7 billion years, and was shown to be dominated by dark energy.

Since then, WMAP has been the darling of the astronomy community and has undoubtedly led hundreds of eager young undergraduates into cosmology. The science community knew that WMAP was still collecting data, but I’m not sure that anyone really expected the news released last week (discussed at Cosmic Variance and at Bad Astronomy, here are the technical publications). The age of the universe was left unchanged at 13.7 billion years, but the date of first star formation was moved to 400 million years in better agreement with theory. Also, the first true evidence for cosmic inflation was presented as well.

It was an exciting announcement from a team that has already done so much for the field of cosmology. To better understand just why the WMAP mission is so important, I’ve put together this relatively brief summary of the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the last decade. These three missions have changed our prospective and refined our vision. Cosmology is now a field of true quantitative prediction that bears little resemblance to the unorganized conjecture of two decades ago.
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