The furthest we can see...yet.

This very wide-angle view – almost the entire night sky – is the furthest light we can see. It is also the oldest: The light was emitted shortly after the Big Bang, and has been traveling through space for 13.7 billion years, until being captured by NASA's WMAP satellite. When first emitted, this light was blindingly bright, but during its long journey to Earth it lost most of its energy; it now has too little energy to stimulate our eyes. It can only be detected by specialized radio telescopes.

In this "baby picture" of the universe, the red and yellow patches are regions that are just a few millionths of a degree hotter than the blue and black areas. This tiny difference helped seed the formation of galaxies out of the shapeless gas that filled the early universe.

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