ROSEMARY CHURCH, WORLD NEWS: New images from space are giving scientists greater knowledge of the Big Bang. CNN's Ann Kellan shows us space before the first star was formed.</s>ANN KELLAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The contention that the universe is flat flows from this picture - a snapshot, astronomers say, of the universe in its infancy, just 500,000 years old, billions of years ago. By studying the complex patterns within the images, astronomers were able to precisely measure the geometry of the universe.</s>MICHAEL TURNER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: The pattern of hot and cold spots on the sky is undeniably that of a flat universe. I think this is the point we're going to remember where we said in the textbooks "Our universe is flat."</s>KELLAN: The universe, of course, is three-dimensional, so it's hard to understand exactly what he means by "flat."</s>PAOLO DEBARNARDIS, UNIVERSITY OF ROME LA SAPIENZA: It's difficult to visualize a three-dimensional flatness.</s>KELLAN: What he means is it's just not curved, as some have thought. The images were taken by a telescope attached to a hot air balloon that lifted off in December of 1998 and flew high over Antarctica for 10 days. The project is called Boomerang.</s>ANDREW LANGE, CALIFORNIA INST. OF TECHNOLOGY: What Boomerang measures is literally the heat that's left over from the Big Bang. We can see this heat still today as an almost perfectly uniform glow of microwaves that fills the sky.</s>KELLAN: The Boomerang experiment is the first real data to support the idea that the universe is flat, a key premise in the Big Bang theory, which says the universe inflated from a tiny region of space immediately after a massive explosion 12 billion years ago. Ann Kellan, CNN, Atlanta.
Images Show Universe to Have "Flat" Geometry 