The Earth isn’t flat, but the Universe is.

 

Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been highly interested by space, and by that I mean outer space. I remember reading the encyclopedia’s available in one of my classrooms as a child, and I would spend hours looking at the pictures, I say pictures because I was too young to understand the math behind what I was reading, but I read it anyway. Hell, I still can’t understand the math behind this stuff. I don’t claim to be an astronomer or scientist, because I am not. I have, however been very interested by the subject for as long as I can remember.

 

NASA’s WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe), after 5 years of scanning the cosmos, has released its findings, and what they found is awesome.

Here are a few tidbits:

• The universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take about 120 million.
• The universe is flat, yes… flat.

 The most interesting of these findings deals with the universe’s energy “budget”, which is all of the matter and energy in the universe summed together. It was determined that this budget breaks down like this: 72.1% is dark energy, 23.3% is dark matter, and 4.62% is normal matter.  Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy blog puts it best: “We occupy a razor thin slice of reality”.

For more in formation WMAP you can check out their website at: http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov