Astronomers may see beginning of time

SEATTLE, March 21 (UPI) -- Promising new research tools soon may allow astronomers their closest glimpse yet of the oldest, farthest and most mysterious phenomenon in science: the precise moment the universe exploded into existence with the Big Bang.

"We might, in a technical sense, soon observe the beginning of time," University of Washington cosmologist Craig Hogan wrote in the March 22 edition of the journal Science.

Hogan said people think of time as a river of large and small "instants" -- millennia, years, minutes, seconds -- flowing continuously from past to present. The universe exploded into existence in a shower of instants, with the beginning of time the smallest instant of all.

These tiny time droplets expanded with space as the universe expanded, stretching into the billions of light years that today separate us from the edges of creation. By peering far enough into the past, astronomers hope to see quanta or "packets" of time, which may be similar to the individual photons that make up waves of light.

"We expect the idea of a 'precise instant' will start to break down at some point as time starts to break into 'particles of time,'" Hogan told United Press International from Seattle. "Not 'hard particles,' but discrete packets of some sort."

The exact moment of creation is difficult to define because it is the ultimate boundary, beyond which "time is not time anymore -- it's something else which will deserve a new name, from which time, space, matter and energy all spring," Hogan said.

Astronomers normally turn telescopes to the night sky, but in the search for time's origins they turn to the cosmic equivalent of a microscope -- satellites that map ultra-small ripples in the fabric of space and time left over from the Big Bang's massive impact.

These ripples appear as the microwave radiation mapped by NASA's COBE or Cosmic Background Explorer.

"COBE showed that careful study of slight variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background could help us understand how events unfolded during the first few minutes after the Big Bang," author and astronomer Jeffrey Bennett told UPI from Boulder, Colo. "However, COBE's resolution was not good enough to distinguish between different models of what exactly occurred."

NASA's latest mission, the Microwave Anisotropy Probe or MAP, aims to improve this resolution.

"MAP should help us figure out what really happened as the Big Bang unfolded," Bennett explained. "Astronomers should be getting plenty of new data about the Big Bang during the next couple of decades."

On the way to the beginning of time, Hogan hopes to spot other amazing sights. He predicts gravitons -- individual packets of gravity -- will dot the MAP maps like individual pixels on a computerized portrait.

"Craig Hogan makes some very thought-provoking suggestions, and describes observational signatures that would be very exciting if they were to show up in the MAP data," University of Montana physicist and gravity wave theorist Neil Cornish told UPI from Bozeman.

"It's quite remarkable to realize that, within 10 to 20 years, we may actually have a solid understanding of what happened when the universe was less than a billion trillion trillionth of a second old," Bennett added.

(Reported by Mike Martin in Columbia, Mo.)