Every direction we look in the sky, we see microwave background radiation that looks exactly like that from an object glowing serenely at some fixed temperature—what physicists call “blackbody” radiation. However, the temperature is ever so slightly different from point to point on the sky; typically, the temperature in one direction differs from that in some other direction by about 1 part in 100,000. These fluctuations are called anisotropies—tiny departures from the otherwise perfectly smooth temperature of the background radiation in every direction.
