Cosmic Background Explorer

SpacecraftWikipedia

34

MENTIONS

17

EPISODES

9

PODCASTS

Sep 18, 2026

Big mysteries explained through your senses

Sep 18 · 1 Mention

Manoush ZomorodiHOST

10:09

[laughs] So how did you come up with this idea of translating all your measurements of these sound waves into music, something that is, we can listen to?

Mark WhittleGUEST

10:22

So starting with the COBE mission, it's a NASA satellite, in 1990, and then the WMAP satellite in 2003, the sensitivity of the microwave telescopes began to reveal these very slight patches on the microwave background.

Mark WhittleGUEST

10:38

And what scientists do with the image of the microwave background, this full sky, this sphere of glowing with patchiness on it, is they do a, a wave analysis of it, and it produces a spectrum.

Mark WhittleGUEST

10:53

Um, and not only were these waves basically acoustic waves, but also there was a fundamental of harmonics, and that is exactly the signature of something like a musical instrument or a human voice.

AI Podcast Summaries from Transcripted.ai (VIDEO)

AI Podcast Summaries from Transcripted.ai (VIDEO)

Into The Impossible: Scott Dodelson on Cosmology’s Crisis and Tensions

Sep 8 · 2 Mentions

speaker_1NARRATOR

1:58

That's a great phrase.

speaker_1NARRATOR

2:00

He also took us back to 1992, when COBE first detected anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background.

speaker_1NARRATOR

2:07

That was a turning point, because many earlier cosmological ideas had been post-dictions rather than true predictions.

speaker_1NARRATOR

2:15

After COBE, cosmology became much more evidence-driven.

speaker_0NARRATOR

2:19

The conversation then turned to current puzzles.

speaker_0NARRATOR

2:23

The Hubble tension, the Sigma-8 tension, the W tension.

Boerne Bible Church

Boerne Bible Church

Genesis and Physics intro

Sep 6 · 8 Mentions

JimGUEST

7:11

And so that's the ground-based system.

JimGUEST

7:13

Again, it was followed on by the launch of COBE in 1989.

JimGUEST

7:17

Had the opportunity to be there with the chair of the physics department at NPS.

JimGUEST

7:21

And it was really, don't ever do it.

JimGUEST

7:27

on the California coast, so it was early.

JimGUEST

7:29

But it was interesting to see it.

JimGUEST

7:32

So this is the COBE satellite on orbit, and it's got shielding to keep it, you know, radiation from the sun.

JimGUEST

7:38

And the two devices are the FIRAS, to look at the spectrum, and the DMR, differential microwave radiometers, that there are three of them, and they look at seven-degree portions of the sky sequentially.

SleepWise: Learn Softly, Sleep Deeply

SleepWise: Learn Softly, Sleep Deeply

The Universe You Cannot See | A SleepWise Story About Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Sep 6 · 1 Mention

Grandpa CohenHOST

77:34

The measurements agree with the calculation only for a modest amount of baryonic matter, roughly 5% of the total content of the cosmos.

Grandpa CohenHOST

77:45

The second, later, more precise measurement comes from the fine pattern of hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background, mapped by COBE and WMAP and, most exquisitely, by the Planck satellite.

Grandpa CohenHOST

78:04

The size and spacing of those anisotropies encode the ratio of ordinary matter to everything else.

Grandpa CohenHOST

78:12

and they too give 5%.

Unknown podcast

The Terrifying Truth About How Cold Space Really Is

Sep 5 · 6 Mentions

speaker_2NARRATOR

45:47

Over the following decades, increasingly sophisticated instruments refined the measurement with extraordinary precision.

speaker_2NARRATOR

45:53

The first major leap came with the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, known as COBE, launched by NASA in 1989.

speaker_2NARRATOR

46:01

COBE carried instruments designed specifically to measure the cosmic microwave background with far greater accuracy than ground-based antennas could achieve.

speaker_2NARRATOR

46:11

Earth's atmosphere absorbs and emits microwaves, contaminating ground-based measurements.

speaker_2NARRATOR

46:18

A satellite above the atmosphere eliminates this problem entirely.

speaker_2NARRATOR

46:22

COBE produced two groundbreaking results.

speaker_2NARRATOR

46:26

First, it measured the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and found that it matched the theoretical prediction for a perfect blackbody radiator with extraordinary precision.

speaker_2NARRATOR

46:37

A blackbody is an idealised object that absorbs all incoming radiation and emits energy in a very specific pattern, determined entirely by its temperature.

Unknown podcast

The Void Linked to the Cold Spot... and Why It Terrifies Scientists

Sep 5 · 3 Mentions

speaker_5UNKNOWN

7:20

The real scientific power of the cosmic microwave background lies not in its existence but in its details, and extracting those details required instruments far beyond anything available in 1965.

speaker_5UNKNOWN

7:33

The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, known as COBE, launched in 1989 and provided the first full sky map of the CMB temperature.

speaker_5UNKNOWN

7:44

What COBE revealed was simultaneously reassuring and astonishing.

speaker_5UNKNOWN

7:48

The radiation was extraordinarily uniform.

speaker_5UNKNOWN

7:51

In every direction astronomers looked, the temperature registered at 2.725 Kelvin.

speaker_5UNKNOWN

10:22

Regions slightly less dense would be slightly cooler.

speaker_5UNKNOWN

10:25

These variations, imprinted onto the last scattering surface when the universe became transparent, should appear as faint temperature differences in the CMB.

speaker_5UNKNOWN

10:35

COBE confirmed that these fluctuations existed, but its angular resolution was too coarse to map them in fine detail.

Unknown podcast

The True Scale of the Universe Will MELT Your Mind

Sep 5 · 1 Mention

speaker_2NARRATOR

78:02

The cosmic microwave background radiation provides a snapshot of those fluctuations when the universe was just 380,000 years old.

speaker_2NARRATOR

78:12

Satellites including COBE, WMAP and Planck mapped tiny temperature variations across the entire sky, revealing the seeds of all future structure.

speaker_2NARRATOR

78:23

Warmer spots corresponded to slightly denser regions.

speaker_2NARRATOR

78:26

Cooler spots corresponded to slightly less dense regions.

Unknown podcast

The Void So Large It Shouldn_t Exist

Sep 4 · 1 Mention

speaker_4NARRATOR

19:12

Cooler spots corresponded to slightly lower density.

speaker_4NARRATOR

19:16

Satellites, including the Cosmic Background Explorer in the early 1990s, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe in the 2000s, and the Planck spacecraft, launched in 2009, have mapped these temperature variations in exquisite detail across the entire sky.

speaker_4NARRATOR

19:36

The maps reveal a mottled pattern of hot and cold spots at various angular scales, encoding the initial conditions that determined all future structure formation.

speaker_4NARRATOR

19:46

Scientists can take this map and feed it into computer simulations that model the physics of gravitational collapse, dark matter clustering, gas dynamics, and dark energy over 13 billion years of cosmic evolution.

Unknown podcast

The Largest Void Ever Found... and Why It_s Terrifying

Sep 4 · 1 Mention

speaker_4NARRATOR

34:26

Cooler spots correspond to regions that were slightly less dense.

speaker_4NARRATOR

34:30

By mapping these temperature variations across the entire sky, Satellites like the Cosmic Background Explorer, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, and the Planck spacecraft created what amounts to a baby picture of the universe, a snapshot of conditions when the cosmos was less than 1% of its current age.

speaker_4NARRATOR

34:50

In 2004 the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, commonly known as WMAP, produced the most detailed full sky temperature map available at the time.

speaker_4NARRATOR

35:01

When scientists examined this map they noticed something peculiar.

Episode 136: Science – The Bedrock of China’s Space Program

Sep 4 · 1 Mention

Ji WuGUEST

19:54

Many years ago

speaker_0HOST

19:55

the COBE satellite detected the 3K background radiation.

speaker_0HOST

20:05

Yes.

speaker_0HOST

20:05

Your instrument will take that further back in time?

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