If you’ve ever seen a baby reach for the moon, literally, reach out and try to grab that big bright ball in the sky, you know that looks can be deceiving when it comes to celestial bodies.
Now people have been gazing at the heavens ever since they learned to bend their necks backwards, but it’s only been in the last five hundred years that we figured out that this world, our home, is not the center of all the stars and planets in the sky. Only in the last century did scientists start thinking of the hundred billion stars in our galaxy as part of an expanding universe.
Now NASA is sending a satellite out beyond our sun to study, of all things, the after-glow of the Big Bang. NASA calls it “the ultimate baby picture” of the universe.
(Hosted by Dick Gordon)
Guests:
Lyman Page, physicist, Princeton University, NASA Microwave Anisotropy Probe
and Alan Hirshfeld, astronomer and author of “Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos.”