'Wiggles' of energy waves over Earth could hold the universe's history

Two metal devices with blue lights at their necks are pointed up toward the sky. In the sky, there are lots of stars and the center of the Milky Way is visible.

By measuring how energy waves wiggle in the sky over Earth, scientists have created a way to delve into the history of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe — starting right at its "first light."

The team, led by Johns Hopkins University astrophysicists, used an array of microwave telescopes called the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) to map 75% of the sky over Earth. This observatory is located in the Andes mountain range, some 16,860 feet above Chile's Atacama Desert.