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Journalism of Courage
By looking at a vast swath of sky, astronomers say they have figured out a way to measure the universe — using a kind of ‘‘cosmological ruler’’.
They found that the universe is flat, with ripples that began as the tiniest variations in radiation left over from the Big Bang, which many cosmologists believe gave birth to the universe.
As it cooled after the mega-explosion some 13.7 billion years ago, the infant universe was actually making a sound and those waves produced the ripples, said Daniel Eisenstein, an astronomer at the University of Arizona.
The way galaxies are scattered across the sky now corresponds to the sound waves in the early times of the cosmos, Eisenstein told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
