COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does cosmic microwave background radiation mean? 

• COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION (noun)
  The noun COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION has 1 sense:

1. (cosmology) the cooled remnant of the hot big bang that fills the entire universe and can be observed today with an average temperature of about 2.725 kelvin

  Familiarity information: COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

(cosmology) the cooled remnant of the hot big bang that fills the entire universe and can be observed today with an average temperature of about 2.725 kelvin

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural phenomena

Synonyms:

CBR; CMB; CMBR; cosmic background radiation; cosmic microwave background; cosmic microwave background radiation

Hypernyms ("cosmic microwave background radiation" is a kind of...):

cosmic radiation (radiation coming from outside the solar system)

Domain category:

cosmogeny; cosmogony; cosmology (the branch of astrophysics that studies the origin and evolution and structure of the universe)

 Context examples 

The results are especially important to the scientific community because they mark the first time that observations from the more recent universe — the adult universe — by a technique called gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering, have yielded results as precise as those from the cosmic microwave background radiation — light from the infant universe.

(New Clues to Universe's Structure Revealed, NASA)