A Flat Universe

So back during one of the Classes Bernie started talking about weather the universe was flat or circular. Well here is an article talking about how evidence shows that the universe is flat based on the geometrical way that light moves, where it moves in a straight line unless it affected by gravity. With this then the universe will continue to expand at its rate and will not collapse on itself in and event called "the Big Crunch". The evidence used to help support this theory is base on measuring the faint background radiation and heat from the Big Bang. It is called Cosmic Microwave Background and is a tiny warmth that is given off by something that is just above absolute zero. Thus by looking at tiny fluctuations in this CMB, scientists are allowed to generate different models about the birth and expansion of the universe. With this process the hardest thing is differentiating between the CMB and interference from our galaxy, but even then it appears pretty well. These measurements of the CMB were taken from a project called Boomerang (Balloon Observation of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics) and the data was gathered down in Antarctica. The measurements were taken from a highly sensitive telescope that was suspended from a balloon 131,000 feet above the ground and was airborne for 11 days between 1998 and 1999. Since then all the one billion measurements had to be taken and processed on the Cray T3E Supercomputer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By doing this it dropped process time from six years to three weeks. In the end they were able to conclude that the universe is flat and will expand forever because there is not enough matter to make it collapse on itself. It is believe though that for a short while after the big bang that the universe was curved because of how confined it was, but because how big and stretched out it has become the universe has become essentially flat.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/727073.stm

Here it the Boomerang Website
http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/boomerang/index.html