cosmic microwave background
Noun
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
Source: WordNetSynonyms
Hypernyms
Examples
If the distance ladder team is correct and the Cosmic Microwave Background team is wrong, then perhaps the Universe is 9% younger than we think: just 12.8 billion years old.
While teams using the Cosmic Microwave Background might all obtain one value for the expansion rate, and teams measuring the large-scale structure of the Universe might agree, other methods yield a wildly different value.