One night of gun-blue sky, the temperature went down to nine degrees.

NEWYORKER: Idols

As the sky bruised, the temperature dropped to freezing and frost filigreed the tent.

BBC: The quietest place in the US

This is the CMB and it has a nearly uniform temperature across the entire sky: a very cold -270.45 deg Celsius.

BBC: Pictures of the early Universe

Scientists used data from Planck to create an artificially colored map of temperature variations across the sky in the early universe, in more detail than ever before.

CNN: Better 'baby picture' of universe emerges

If you pick up all the temperature data points in the sky map and put them in histogram, you should get a nice bell curve.

BBC: The first fractions of a second after the Big Bang

Another anomaly of these results is that temperature fluctuations are not uniform across the sky map.

CNN: Better 'baby picture' of universe emerges

One of the ways scientists study the CMB is by subjecting the warm and cold spots in the radiation to a detailed statistical analysis, examining the deviations in temperature as a function of their size on the sky - their angular scale.

BBC: The first fractions of a second after the Big Bang

Rusts especially exercised him: how they lived, under the green live tissue of stems, how they spread, travelling for miles on the jet stream, and how they fell from the sky to infect even the healthiest crop, if the moisture and temperature were right.

ECONOMIST: Norman Borlaug

Theorists had predicted that its temperature would vary by a tiny amount (millionths of a degree) over the sky.

ECONOMIST: The universe