Dave from Imperial College sez, “We’ve taken observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background from the Planck mission and turned them into a 3D printed map of the temperature of the universe when it was just a few hundred thousand years old. Download the files and print your own baby universe!”
“Differences in the temperature of the CMB relate to different densities, and it is these that spawned the formation of structure in the universe – including galaxies, galaxy clusters and superclusters.
“Representing these differences as bumps and dips on a spherical surface allows anyone to appreciate the structure of the early universe. For example, the famous ‘CMB cold spot’, an unusually low temperature region in the CMB, can be felt as a small but isolated depression.”
The CMB can be printed from a range of 3D printers, and two files types have been created by the team: one for simple single-colour structures and one that includes the temperature differences represented as colours as well as bumps and dips. The files for both types are free to download.
Cosmic Sculpture
[David L Clements; Suzu Sato; Ana Portela Fonseca/Zenodo]
Physicists make it possible to 3D print your own baby universe
[Hayley Dunning/Imperial College London]