you
how do we go from from the Big Bang
that's really when you think about it
very strange situation the universe
being very hot and dense and expanding
and filling and turning out full of
galaxies and planets and stars and
eventually life you know how do we get
there how did that happen well something
crazy went along to make it happen
because our simple models aren't working
right now we're missing a step it's like
a missing link and we give to find the
the fossils back there in the early
erase the missing link that will get us
from the uniform universe to the
structured universe we have today
you
one of the really unique things about
Kobe is that it's a scientific
experiment from the very beginning it's
like taking the instruments in your
laboratory or instruments that we flew
on balloons or in rockets years ago and
putting those into a satellite package
and essentially moving your laboratory
in the space Kobe is attacking a problem
for which it is very hard to get any
good observations in fact it's
dreadfully hard to get good
observational cause of cosmological data
and if Kobe is specially designed so
that all the things that might screw up
the data or perturb it are you know
let's put in an orbit which is shielded
from the Sun very carefully it's kept
cold and a lot of things have been done
so that you don't have to correct so
much and you can trust the data better
so the public the cosmological
information that comes from this we hope
will be definitive and will not you will
be very hard to argue with
when we look at the cosmic background
radiation we're actually looking at the
dominant form of energy in the whole
universe this radiation fills the whole
sky comes from every direction and so it
adds up to be a hundred times as much
energy as comes from all the stars all
the galaxies all the sun's all the
planets that people can see with their
own eyes a hundred times as much as that
so it's very important to realize we're
looking at the dominant energy of the
whole universe this is the remnant of
the Big Bang itself that we're studying
with the cobe satellite
coby gives us the opportunity to go look
in detail at some of the major
predictions of the big bang theory and
the hope is that those details will
either verify or collapse that whole
theory
you
if we are successful in subtracting out
the foreground radiations and definitely
identifying a residual cosmic glow which
can be interpreted as the cumulative
emission of first generations of stars
and galaxies this is in and of itself a
most exciting discovery this gives us
direct evidence of an epoch in cosmic
history that has not directly been
observed before
what the Kobe will tell us at the end of
the mission and after our
interpretations are done is how we got
here how the galaxies were formed from
whatever was there before the Kobe
mission is worth every ounce of effort
we've put into it cosmology as you can
understand is a very difficult problem
to study objectively we are given very
few fossils on the beach if you will
those few that are present and
accessible still to us at this time 15
billion years or so after the primeval
chaos are worth every bit of scrutiny we
can give to them