Take a 360 Tour of COBE's Cosmic Baby Picture

View the entire sky with the microwave eyes of NASA’s COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite in this immersive video. COBE took the first baby picture of the universe, revealing slight temperature variations when the cosmos was just 380,000 years old. This image shows the entire sky using four years of observations by COBE’s Differential Microwave Radiometer. The central plane of our galaxy runs across the middle, and its center is marked by a white X. Red indicates hotter regions, blue colder. The fluctuations are extremely faint, varying by only 1 part in 100,000 from the average temperature. They represent density variations in the early universe thought to have given rise to the structures we see today. After stripping away foreground emission arising from dust, hot gas, and charged particles interacting with magnetic fields in our galaxy, COBE data revealed tiny variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background — the oldest light in the universe — for the first time.

Music credit: “Meetings in Underwater Ruins,” Philippe Andre Vandenhende [SACEM], Olivier Louis Perrot [SACEM] and Idriss-El-Mehdi Bennani [SACEM], Universal Production Music.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Image credit: NASA/COBE Science Team
Producer: Scott Wiessinger (eMITS)
Narrator: Thomas Essinger-Hileman (NASA/GSFC)
Science Writer: Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)

This video can be freely shared and downloaded at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14720. While the video in its entirety can be shared without permission, the music and some individual imagery may have been obtained through permission and may not be excised or remixed in other products. Specific details on such imagery may be found here: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14720. For more information on NASA’s media guidelines, visit https://nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines.
Transcript:
0:01
[Music throughout] Hi, I'm Tom Essinger-Hileman.
0:03
I'm an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
0:07
in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory.
0:11
I use sensitive microwave telescopes to try to understand
0:15
the composition, origins and history of our universe.
Cosmic Baby Picture
0:20
This image is our first baby picture of the universe, taken
0:25
by the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE satellite.
0:30
Really, I think what's so interesting about this is it gives you an idea
0:36
of what you would see if you looked out of the sky with microwave eyes.
0:40
We look out at the sky and we see a bunch of stars.
0:43
Maybe we see our galaxy.
0:46
But if you had the ability to look out at microwave wavelengths,
0:50
this is the sort of image that you would see, you’d see a very uniform sky
0:55
with these slight bright and dim patches.
0:58
You'd be looking back
0:59
to some of the earliest moments in the history of our universe.
Cosmic Microwave Background
1:04
COBE operated from 1989 to 1993,
1:08
and COBE revolutionized our understanding of the universe by
1:12
observing the cosmic microwave background that you're seeing here — the CMB.
1:17
The CMB is remnant
1:19
light from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang,
1:23
when the universe was transitioning from a hot, dense plasma
1:28
to a cooler neutral gas of predominantly hydrogen and helium.
1:33
At this early time, galaxies and stars hadn't formed.
1:38
What we're seeing in this image of the CMB
1:41
is the seeds of future galaxies,
1:44
the red and blue patches in this map of the sky
1:49
represent more and less dense regions
1:52
in that early universe, and the more dense regions clumped together
1:55
to form the galaxies that we see in the universe today.
Measurements
2:00
This was a first of its kind measurement
2:02
of tiny fluctuations in the microwave brightness of the sky.
2:07
The DMR instrument very precisely measured
2:10
these tiny differences at wavelengths from 3 to 10 millimeters,
2:15
that's around where your cellphone operates.
2:18
The CMB is remarkably uniform;
2:21
these fluctuations are just one part in 100,000
2:25
of the overall 2.7 Kelvin temperature of the CMB.
2:30
And they're on very large angular scales, on very large physical scales in our universe.
2:35
Future measurements
2:37
were able to look at this map of the sky
2:41
in greater detail, and with greater angular resolution.
Future Measurements
2:46
The universe when this was emitted
2:48
was about a thousand times smaller, and about a thousand times hotter.
2:53
So when the cosmic microwave background was emitted,
2:56
this light peaked up in the visible.
2:59
The universe as a whole has been expanding and cooling, and the cosmic
3:02
microwave background has been cooling along with it.
3:06
the light has shifted to longer wavelengths: into the microwave
3:09
and closer to the radio part of the spectrum.
3:12
The idea that you can answer fundamental questions about the history
3:16
of our universe with a map like this that we're seeing here is just amazing.