WASHINGTON, March 17: A NASA space probe has peered back in time to a bare instant — less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second — after the Big Bang, astronomers said on Thursday.

The robotic probe looked at the afterglow from the Big Bang, the energetic event scientists believe gave birth to the universe some 13.7 billion years ago, and managed to discern unprecedented detail about the earliest moments of the cosmos.

“We report today the most precise measurements of our infant universe,” said Charles Bennett, principle investigator for NASA’s WMAP spacecraft.

“We have new evidence that the universe suddenly grew from sub-microscopic to astronomical size in less than the blink of an eye,” Mr Bennett said at a telephone news conference.

“This tremendous inflation of the universe happened in much less than a trillionth of a second.”

The WMAP mission — short for Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe — detected light created in the early universe that has been travelling across the universe for more than 13 billion years, he said.

Seen in the form of faint microwaves, this early light helped astronomers perceive tiny variations in what Mr Bennett called ‘an otherwise astonishingly empty sea of nothingness’ that was the baby universe.—Reuters