Labels:bulletin board | reckoner OCR: cosmologist and priest Georges Lemaitre proposed that the expansior of the universe might be traced to an exceedingly dense state he called the primeval "super- -atom it might even be possible he thought to detect remnant radiation from the primeval atom But what would this radiation signature look like? When the universe was very young and hot, radiation could not travel very far without being absorbed and emitted by some particle This continuous exchange of energy maintained a state of thermal equilibrium; any particular region was unlikely to be much hotter or cooler than the average When matter and energy settle to such state the result isa so-called thermal spectrum where the intensity of radiation at each wavelength isa definite function of the temperature Hence radiation originating ...
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