Echo of the Big Bang

A tight-knit, high-powered group of scientists and engineers spent eight years building a satellite designed, in effect, to read the genome of the universe. The Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) has finally reported in--and it's found things nobody ever expected.

For more than a year now, the MAP satellite has been hovering in the cold of deep space, a million miles from Earth, in an effort to determine whether the science of cosmology--the study of the origin and evolution of the universe--has been on the right track for the past two decades. What MAP has been looking for is a barely perceptible pattern of hot and cold spots in the faint whisper of microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang, the event that 14 billion years ago gave birth to all of space, time, matter, and energy. The pattern encoded in those microwaves will provide the answers to some of the great unanswered questions of cosmology: What is the universe made of? What is its geometry? How much of it consists of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that continue to baffle astronomers? How fast is it expanding? And did it undergo a period of inflationary hyper-expansion at the very beginning? MAP has now given definitive answers to these mysteries--and they are not what everyone expected.

Telling the full story of MAP and its surprising revelations, this book is both a personal and a scientific tale of discovery. In its pages, readers will come to know the science of cosmology and the people who have finally, seventy-four years after we first learned that the universe is expanding, deciphered its mysteries.

Contents

• Is something amiss in the universe?
• The birth of cosmology
• A whisper of microwaves
• Bad blood
• Now what?
• Forming a team
• How to Design a satellite
• The build
• Horse race
• Launch
• Deepening mystery
• The answer
• Glossary