Budget
esiegel | March 6, 2008The cosmic microwave background is the radiation left over from the big bang. It's very uniform, 2.725 Kelvin everywhere. We're moving with respect to it, so there's a doppler shift, and we see that as a dipole moment in the Temperature. When we subtract that out, we see variations on the order of 30 microKelvins! WMAP is a satellite (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) that measured these anisotropies, and they just released its year 5 data. First off, with the uniform and dipole parts subtracted out, and with the foreground from the galaxy also taken out, here's the map of the microwave…