Baby picture from the beginning of time

SPACE.com -- Astronomers Detect First Split-Second of the Universe

In the beginning, there was the Big Bang. The rest is cosmic history. It's hard to believe the universe went from being the size of a gumball to extraordinary cosmic proportions in a trillion-trillionth of a second. This whole idea is crazier than science fiction because it's real. Scientists took a "picture" of the afterglow from this insane fraction of a moment in time. It's just been ballooning out since then at an inflationary rate for the past 13.7-billion years. Before that, there was nothing. That nothingness is hard to grasp in our brains that evolved to understand the world in the three-dimensional fashion in which we grew up. But after that nothingness, then there was light. It's this precise moment that scientists were able to map out using the WMAP probe. That feat in itself is no less a miracle than the inflation they describe through the means of science, which in no way takes away from the magic of the event itself.