The Blog

G in SURGE is Galaxies.

The fourth piece of evidence refers to the great galaxy seeds.

After finding the predicted expanding universe and radiation afterglow, scientists would turn their attention to another prediction that would confirm the Big Bang.

If the Big Bang actually occurred, scientists believed that we should see slight variations (or ripples) in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation that Penzias and Wilson discovered. These temperature variations enabled matter to come together by gravitational attraction into galaxies. If found, they would create the fourth line of evidence that the universe had a beginning.

In 1989 the search for ripples were intensified when NASA launched a $200 million satellite aptly called COBE for Cosmic Background Explorer. Containing extremely sensitive instruments, COBE was able to see whether or not these ripples actually existed in the background radiation and how precise they were.

When the project leader, astronomer George Smoot, announced COBE’s findings in 1992, his shocking characterization was quoted in newspapers all over the world. He said, “If you are religious, it is like looking at God.”

Cambridge astronomer Stephen Hawking called these finding “the most important discovery of the century, if not all time.”

What did the COBE discover to merit much momentous descriptions?

COBE not only found ripples, but scientists were amazed at their precision.

The ripples show that the explosion and expansion of the universe was precisely adjusted to cause just enough matter to congregate to all galaxy formation, but not enough to cause the universe to collapse back on itself. Any slight variation one way or the other, and we would not exist. In fact, the ripples are so exact—down to one in one hundred thousand.

George Smoot regarded this discovery as the “fingerprints of the maker“.

Not only that, but COBE also took infrared pictures of the ripples.

Keep in mind that space observations are actually observations of the past because of the long time it takes light from distant objects to reach us. COBE’s pictures are actually pictures of the past. The infrared pictures taken by COBE point to the existence of matter from the very early universe that would ultimately form into galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Smoot called this matter “seeds” of the galaxies.

These “seeds” are the largest structures ever detected, with the biggest extending across one-third of the known universe. That is 10,000,000,000 light years or 60 billion trillion miles (60 followed by 21 zeros) miles. How great is our God!

How does the Einstein’s Theory of Relativity prove that the universe had a beginning?