My topic is about cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). It's a really faint glow of light that fills the Universe. It could only be detected using a radio telescope. When you look at the night sky, all you can see are the stars and the darkness behind them, so when you use a radio telescope you may see some sort of glow in the sky instead of darkness. This is an afterglow produced by the Big Bang and left behind the CMBR as evidence. Long ago, before stars and planets formed, the Universe was smaller, warmer, and had a brightness to it. The cosmic background radiation was created in the era of recombination, when the radiation cooled and the universe began to expand. CMBR has all sorts of names like: 3 Kelvin background radiation, cosmic background radiation, and microwave background. It has names like these because the radiation is like a blackbody and its temperature is less than three degrees Kelvin, or about 2.76K. It's cold enough for electrons and protons to recombine into hydrogen atoms. At this moment the temperature is around 2,725°. “…If we could see microwaves, the entire sky would grow brighter…” (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_test_cmb.html). “The reason we can still see the cosmic background radiation is because; the cosmic microwave background does not originate with the big bang itself. It originates about 380,000 years after the big bang, when the temperature dropped enough to allow electrons and protons to form atoms. When released, the cosmic microwave background wasn't microwaves at all: the photons had higher energies. Since that time, they have been redshifted due to the expansion of the universe, and are currently located in the microwave b...... center of the card ...... e. I got this from every website I've read for the essay so far. There's a map of the cosmic microwave background radiation and it looks kind of like an oval on one side and there are bright colors in it and the colors are like bright pink, red, dark blue and light blue, but they're just scattered everywhere at the its interior. They should represent the hot and cold of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The red color on the CMBR is like the lowest energy so it is the coldest, the bright pink one has medium low energy and is cool but not that cold, the dark blue has medium high energy and so it has a warm temperature , and the last color is the light blue color and it has the warmest temperature and its energy level is the lowest. I got all my information at http://cmb.physics.wisc.edu/tutorial/cmb.html