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Concept

cosmic microwave background

A glowing red star with two faint, reddish beams extending outward against a gradient blue sky, symbolizing the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Faint microwave radiation filling all of space, the relic glow of the universe at 380,000 years old, redshifted by cosmic expansion to a near-perfect black-body spectrum at 2.725 kelvin. Discovered accidentally by Penzias and Wilson in 1964 and mapped in extraordinary detail by COBE, WMAP and Planck satellites. Its tiny anisotropies encode the seeds of every galaxy.

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