A STRANGE pattern in the cosmic background radiation, the lingering afterglow of the big bang, may shake cosmology to its roots by undermining a theory called inflation. This says that the young Universe went through a momentary phase of superfast expansion.
David Valls-Gabaud of CNRS, the French national scientific research agency in Strasbourg, and his colleagues found the odd feature in a sky map built up by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. This satellite mapped the cosmic background radiation, which escaped from the big bang when the Universe was only 300 000 years old.
The map shows ripplesvariations in the wavelength or "temperature" of the radiation around the average of 2.726 kelvin. These hot and cold spots represent the first clumps of matter to congeal out of the big bang fireball. According to a popular theory, such clumps were seeded in an epoch of inflation, during the first split ...