eli5 how can we see the surface of last scatter

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How can we see the surface of last scatter. do they use a telescope or something? and if they do is that how they see it, just a big thing of colors?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

If you mean cosmic microwave background, it’s as simple as pointing s microwave receiver dish at part of the sky and recording what it receives.

Of course that just gives you a ton of noise and will likely give you as much local source as anything else. You need to have a really big receiver, keep it very stable, and record over a long period of time to get a usable ‘exposure’ of that part of the sky. Then add to it with every other sector of the sky you want to map, over and over.

Then you need to account for and edit out possible astronomical sources or reflectors like stars, planets, galaxies, tc. Only after that do you have a possible ‘map’ of the real, truly old ‘backdrop’ of the universe, and can read spikes in the frequencies to figure out things like curvature, the earliest matter, etc.

In real terms, true cosmic background radiation represents the oldest images we can observe, at a point where matter was a distributed, opaque ‘soup’ of particles emitting those microwaves, rather a ‘stew’ of atoms in a near-vaccuum like we live in today.

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