Below are shown maps of variations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) above a constant 2.73 Kelvin blackbody spectrum at three observing frequencies (left hand column) and maps of the differences between observations at two frequencies (right hand column) obtained by the BOOMERANG (balloon observations of millimetric extragalactic radiation and geomagentics) experiment.
Below is shown the power in particular size scales (scale is 180o/l). For example, for a mulitpole of l = 200, the angular size scale is s ~ 0.9o.
The observed size scales place constraints on the sizes of fluctuations in the Universe at the Epoch of Recombination (time when matter and radiation decoupled in the early Universe). The various theories for the early evolution of the Universe make different predictions about the scale which should contain most of the power and the amount of power contained in the scale. The inflationary cold dark matter model predicts that maximum power should fall at scale l ~ 200 consistent with the observations. Below is a comparison of different models (models calculated with different cosmological parameters) and how they agree with the new observations.
The BOOMERANG results are consistent with dense universes, the small scales indicate that the tendency for gravitational condensation must have been strong compared to effects which try to smear things out, radiation and the general expansion of the Universe. The solid dots (defined by the observations) fall around the line Omegam + Omega lambda = 1. The results are consistent with models which roughly have the critical density, that is, universes which are flat (Euclidean). This suggests a nonzero Cosmological Constant and large amounts of exotic matter (nonbaryonic matter) in the Universe.