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Nature Physics 5, 89–90 (1 February 2009) | doi:10.1038/nphys1195

Cosmology: Designs for an asymmetric universe

David Wands

The temperature and polarization maps provided by NASA's WMAP satellite have been hailed as a triumph for the standard cosmological model. They show primordial density fluctuations, predicted by Jim Peebles and others over thirty years ago, as the initial conditions from which the large-scale structure in our Universe grew via gravitational collapse, albeit with suitable admixtures of dark matter and some form of dark energy in addition to ordinary, baryonic matter.