NASA released the best 'baby picture' of the Universe ever taken, which contains such stunning detail that it may be one of the most important scientific results of recent years.

The new cosmic portrait -- capturing the afterglow of the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background -- was captured by scientists using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) during a sweeping 12-month observation of the entire sky.

One of the biggest surprises revealed in the data is that the first generation of stars to shine in the Universe first ignited only 200 million years after the Big Bang, much earlier than many scientists had expected.

In addition, the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the Universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a remarkably small one percent margin of error.

The WMAP team found that the Big Bang and Inflation theories continue to ring true. The contents of the Universe include 4% atoms (ordinary matter), 23% of an unknown type of dark matter, and 73% of a mysterious dark energy. The new measurements even shed light on the nature of the dark energy, which acts as a sort of an anti-gravity. >from *New Image Of Infant Universe Reveals Era Of First Stars, Age Of Cosmos, And More*, february 11, 2003

related context
> center for cosmological physics: probing phenomena beyond standard model. september 13, 2001
> first light. august 14, 2001
> Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe

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