A team of researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has made a groundbreaking discovery, unveiling images of the universe at a mere 380,000 years old. This milestone marks the earliest snapshot of the cosmos, providing unprecedented insights into the formation and evolution of our universe.
The ACT telescope spent five years scanning the sky for faint signals from the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is thought to be the oldest light in the universe. The resulting data have revealed a wealth of information about the universe’s composition, temperature, and expansion rate.
One of the key findings is that the universe’s age is precisely 13.8 billion years, with an uncertainty of only 0.1%. This result confirms the widely accepted cosmological model and provides a more precise understanding of the universe’s expansion rate.
The team also discovered that the standard model of cosmology has passed an extraordinarily precise test, with no evidence to support alternative explanations for the Hubble tension. The Hubble constant is the rate at which space is expanding today, and its measurement has been a topic of debate among scientists in recent years.
Furthermore, the ACT data have shed new light on the composition of the universe, revealing that nearly all of the helium was produced within the first three minutes of cosmic time. This finding agrees with theoretical models and observations in galaxies, providing further confirmation of the standard model’s accuracy.
The discovery is a significant milestone in our understanding of the universe, and it marks the beginning of a new era in cosmological research. The ACT telescope has set a new standard for precision and sensitivity, paving the way for future discoveries that will continue to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos.
The researchers involved in this project have used cutting-edge technology and techniques to analyze the data from the ACT telescope. The National Institute of Standards and Technology provided detectors with high sensitivity, while the National Science Foundation supported the mission for over two decades.
The new results are shared publicly on NASA’s LAMBDA archive, allowing the scientific community to access and build upon this groundbreaking discovery.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-clearest-images-year-universe-reveal.html