Science magazine reports:
A strange-looking telescope that scanned the skies from a perch in northern Chile for 15 years has released its final data set: detailed maps of the infant universe showing the roiling clouds of hydrogen and helium gas that would one day coalesce into the stars and galaxies we see today.

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope is not the first to survey the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the light released 380,000 years after the Big Bang when the early universe's soup of particles formed atoms and space became transparent. But the data — posted as preprints online today — give researchers a new level of detail on the density of the gas clouds and how they were moving.
At the top of the page for Science's article is an image where different colors "show areas where the polarization of the CMB light — its direction of vibration — differ, revealing how gases first move tangentially around areas of higher density (orange) and later fall straight in (blue) under the influence of gravity."

Long-time Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes:
Using the data, researchers tested how well the standard cosmological theory, known as lambda cold dark matter, described the universe at that time 13.8 billion years ago; it's a remarkably good fit, they conclude.
The article notes that "back in the Chilean desert," the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's successor, the Simons Observatory, has already taken its first image, and "will begin its even more detailed examination of the CMB in the coming months."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/22/0542234/this-is-the-sharpest-image-yet-of-our-universe-as-a-baby?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.