it was filled with photons and a hot, dense plasma. This plasma cooled as the universe expanded, and when it cooled enough to form stable atoms it no longer absorbed the photons. The photons present at that stage have been propagating ever since, growing fainter and less energetic as they spread through the ever-expanding universe. The temperature of this radiation is almost the same at all points on the sky, but there is a slight variation (around one part in 100,000) between the temperature received from different directions. The angular scale of these fluctuations - the typical angle between a hot patch and a cold patch on the sky - depends on the curvature of the universe which in turn depends on its density as described above. Thus, measurements of this angular scale allow an estimation of Ω0. Another probe of Ω0 is the frequency of Type-Ia supernovae at different distances from Earth. These supernovae, the explosions of degenerate white dwarf stars, are a type of standard candle; this means that the processes governing their intrinsic brightness are well understood so that a measure of apparent brightness when seen from Earth can be used to derive accurate distance measures for them (the apparent brightness decreasing in proportion to the square of the distance - see luminosity distance). Comparing this distance to the redshift of the supernovae gives a measure of the rate at which the universe has been expanding at different points in history. Since the expansion rate evolves differently over time in cosmologies with different total densities, Ω0 can be inferred from the supernovae data. Data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (measuring CMB anisotropies) combined with that from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and observations of type-Ia supernovae constrain Ω0 to be 1 within 1%. In other words, the term |Ω − 1| is currently less than 0.01, and therefore must have been less than 10−62 at the Planck era. Implication This tiny value is the crux of the flatness problem. If the initial density of the universe could take any value, it would seem extremely surprising to find it so 'finely tuned' to the critical value . Indeed, a very small departure of Ω from 1 in the early universe would have been magnified during billions of years of expansion to create a current density very far from critical. In the case of an overdensity this would