Big Bang aftermath reveals slightly older universe

Dan Vergano, USA TODAY | USATODAY

A European space satellite mapping the Big Bang's fiery aftermath reports that the universe is slightly more ancient that previously estimated, about 13.8 billion years old.

That pushes the age estimate for the cosmos back about 100 million years, based on the new results from the European Space Agency's Planck space mission.

Planck, named after pioneering German physicist Max Planck, scans the "cosmic microwave background" radiation permeating the sky, leftover heat from the earliest epoch of the universe. Its map reveals clumps of matter that resolved into galaxies in the early universe.

The results of the mission announced Thursday also show the universe is expanding a bit more slowly than past estimates and contains more matter than has been suspected. Most intriguing, "light patterns are asymmetrical on two halves of the sky," says a NASA statement describing the results. That's surprising because physicists would expect the matter releasing this light to be uniformly distributed across the universe.

"This is a triumph for both theory and experiment," says physicist Max Tegmark of MIT. "We humans thought we'd figured out enough about our 13.8 billion year old universe to be able to make remarkably precise predictions about what its baby pictures should look like, and we were right!"

The results strongly support a theory called "inflation," which describes how the universe grew from a sub-atomic seed to vast size in the first trillionths of a trillionth of a second of its existence, says project scientist Charles Lawrence of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Lawrence says that more analysis is needed of the asymmetrical light patterns seen in the sky map to explain what they tell us about how inflation unfolded.

VIDEO: Planck data, lensed and unlensed