Probe looks back to less than a second after Big Bang

WASHINGTON -- A NASA probe has peered back in time to less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, astronomers reported yesterday.

The robotic probe looked at what scientists described as the effects of the Big Bang, the energy event many scientists say gave birth to the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

''We report today the most precise measurements of our infant universe," said Charles Bennett, lead investigator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spacecraft, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

''We have new evidence that the universe suddenly grew from submicroscopic to astronomical size in less than the blink of an eye," Bennett said in a telephone news conference.

''This tremendous inflation of the universe happened in much less than a trillionth of a second."

The probe detected light created in the early universe that has been traveling for more than 13 billion years, Bennett said.

Seen in the form of faint microwaves, this light helped astronomers perceive tiny variations in what Bennett called ''an otherwise astonishingly empty sea of nothingness," the early universe.

Back then, the scientists said, there were no planets, no stars, no galaxies, and only infinitesimal differences in temperature.

These tiny temperature differences formed patterns that eventually clumped into all the physical features known as matter, including the Earth.

The probe's picture of the early universe looks like an oval, with cool spots in blue and green and hot spots in red and yellow.

The observations show that only about 4 percent of it is ordinary matter and that 22 percent is dark matter -- which is not made of atoms, does not emit or absorb light, and is detected only by gravity. The report said 74 percent was a mysterious ''dark energy."

''Dark energy is causing yet another current growth spurt," Bennett said. ''Fortunately, it is more gentle than the one 13.7 billion years ago."