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Observations of the microwave background, the left-over heat from the big bang, are snap-shots of the universe only three hundred thousand years after the big bang. The combination of microwave background observations and measurements of the large-scale distribution of galaxies have answered many of the questions that have driven cosmology for the past few decades: How old is the universe? What is its size and shape? What is the composition of the universe? I will focus on results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and from other recent cosmological experiments and show how they have addressed these questions.
While there
has been significant progress, many key cosmological questions remain
unanswered: What happened during the first moments of the big bang?
What is the dark energy? What were the properties of the first stars?
I will discuss how future observations may start to answer these
new and deeper questions.