SCIENCE
Big Bang birth of universe
March 22, 2013 - The European Space Agency has published its long-awaited map of the “cosmic microwave background” -- the afterglow of the Big Bang that formed the universe 13.8 billion years ago -- based on observations from the €700 million Planck space telescope. The implications are that the newborn universe inflated a trillion trillion trillion times within the blink of an eye, and that today’s universe will go on growing for ever, ending up eventually as cold, dark, unimaginably vast nothingness.