ABSTRACT
Most astronomers believe that the universe was created at one set moment, in what is usually called the ‘Big Bang’. The universe was opaque, because photons of light could not travel far before being blocked by collisions. In an open universe, expansion will continue indefinitely, with the clusters of galaxies moving further and further apart. In a closed universe, with Ω greater than 1, the clusters of galaxies will eventually start to draw together again; red shifts will be succeeded by blue shifts, and the temperature of the background radiation will rise. New data concerning the very early universe were obtained in 1999, from the project termed Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics. The complex patterns visible in the images confirm predictions of the patterns which would result from sound-waves racing through the young universe, creating structures which subsequently evolved into giant clusters and superclusters of gala.
