Читать книгу Origin and Evolution of the Universe - Группа авторов - Страница 20

The conclusion of this chapter is merely the introduction to the next act, the origin of galaxies, described in Chapter 2. The conditions necessary to form galaxies were established during an inflationary epoch that occurred earlier than 10⁻¹² seconds after the Big Bang. Because inflation makes any preexisting structures in the Universe much too large to be observable, the temperature fluctuations observed by COBE, which were created during inflation, are the oldest structures we can ever observe.