Music Dr. Charles Bennett: A brand new discovery from these observations is that we have detected the era where the very first stars in the universe ignited. And this era was for many, surprisingly early. It's only about two hundred million years after the Big Bang from the time that you had the intense concentration of all kinds of exotic particles, to the time when gas clouds can form and condense and form stars. So we've detected that era for the first time and it is very early. Well because it takes the light over 13 billion years to reach us, we are seeing now what the universe looked like then--over 13 billion years ago. So its a fossil remnant of what the early universe was like and just fossils are used to study the past, we use this light to study what the universe what it's like way back near the very beginning. Dr. Lyman Page: What is the map? Well that picture behind me is really, it's an image of the whole sky. And its made to image the whole sky on this oval and you can see in there blue spots and red spots. And what those correspond to are slightly hotter and colder images of the sky. That's a picture there, those hot and cold spots that pattern, its really the, its the after glow of the Big Bang. Dr Bennett: We determine using this cosmic consistency the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years old. And we've made that determination to 1% accuracy which is just amazing. Dr. Page: On a sort of deeper long term level its this amazing consistency that the picture we can put together of the universe is relatively simple that the pieces fit together, its a stunning confirmation of this, of the study of cosmology from many years now. Its just built up and here it is. In some ways we're getting to know the cosmos like we know our own backyards. Its the universe has all of a sudden has gotten smaller and much more familiar. Beeping Beeping