Starts With A Bang Podcast

Perhaps the strongest evidence we've ever acquired in support of the Big Bang has been the discovery of the leftover radiation from its early, hot, dense state: today's cosmic microwave background, or CMB. While there were many competing ideas for our cosmic origins, only the Big Bang predicted a uniform, omnidirectional bath of blackbody radiation: exactly what the CMB is.But it turns out the CMB encodes much more information than just our cosmic origins; it allows us to map the very early Universe from when it was just 380,000 years old, and gives us vital information about what has happened to light from that time over its 13.8 billion year journey to our eyes. It encodes information about our cosmic expansion history, about dark matter and dark energy, about intervening galaxy clusters, and about the material here in our own galaxy, along with much more. It is, arguably, the richest source of information from any one single observable in our entire Universe.Here to guide us through what CMB scient