You Won't Believe the Universe's 'Hours-Old Baby Pictures'

New research has unveiled images of the universe in its infancy—a mere 388,000 after the Big Bang.

The snaps of the universe were produced by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration (ACT), which measured light that had traveled for more than 13 billion years.

And while 388,000 years may seem like an indescribably long time to humans, the universe is currently around 13.8 billion years old—meaning these photos are equivalent to "hours-old baby pictures" of a middle-aged human.

The photos show light, dark and the polarization of light—background radiation known as the cosmic microwave background, and details the movement of hydrogen and helium gas at the beginning of the universe.

Suzanne Staggs, director of the ACT and professor of physics at Princeton University, said in a statement that the new images show the "first steps towards making the earliest stars and galaxies."

"Before, we got to see where things were, and now we also see how they're moving.," she said, comparing it to using tides to infer the presence of the moon, "the movement tracked by the light's polarization tells us how strong the pull of gravity was in different parts of space."

Researcher Sigurd Naess of the University of Oslo said that while other telescopes measures polarization with low noise, "none of them cover as much of the sky as ACT does."

Researchers used a five-year exposure with a sensitive telescope based in Chile, tuned to see millimeter-wavelength light.

The images show what appears to be clouds, but is in fact regions with less dense hydrogen and helium—over billions of years, gravity would pull the denser regions inwards, to begin building stars and galaxies.

The researchers say that these results confirm a simple model of the universe, and is helping to answer questions about the universe's origins.

The team has measured that the observable universe extends close to 50 billion light years in all directions, and has as much mass as close to 2 trillion trillion suns.

It's believed that almost all of the helium in the universe was produced in the first three minutes of cosmic time, while elements that make up human beings, which includes carbon and oxygen, formed in stars later.

The new data also confirms the age of the universe as 13.8 billion years, with a less than one percent uncertainty.

Their work has not yet gone through peer review, but will be presented at the American Physical Society conference on March 19.

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