Scientists combine forces to study first light

Scientists are designing a next-generation experiment to map the Big Bang's relic afterglow. In the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe was too high for stable atoms to form. The universe was filled with a hot, dense plasma of protons and electrons, with the primordial photons bouncing off the protons and electrons like light scatters off water droplets in fog. As the universe expanded this primordial "fog" cooled until, 380,000 years after the Bi...