# Tag Info

Accepted

### How fast are we moving relative to the CMB?

Yes, our (i.e. the Sun's) motion in the "global", or comoving, reference frame can be measured accurately from the dipole of the cosmic microwave background. The latest results from the Planck ...
• 33.8k
Accepted

### Why was the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) released at a blackbody temperature of 3000K rather than 30,000K?

The CMB is produced as the ionisation fraction of hydrogen falls from a high value to a very small value. Contrary to what is written in the Quora answer you may have been misled by, this happens at a ...
• 118k
Accepted

### Why can we observe the Cosmic Microwave Background no matter the direction we look?

Until the Universe was 380,000 years old, it was filled with a gas of protons an electrons. There was also radiation, in thermal equilibrium with the matter, and because it was so hot, the protons and ...
• 33.8k

### Why does the Fourier transform of this CMB image have a hole in it?

Having now looked at the paper by Aiola et al. (2020), it emerges that for that map, they filtered the data to exclude low frequency multipoles with $|l|<150$, corresponding to about 1 degree. This ...
• 118k
Accepted

### Where's the matter that created the CMB?

It is all around you. It was gravitationally attracted to clumps of dark matter where it reached sufficient density to begin to interact with itself (via the electromagnetic force), break up into ...
• 91k