'Big Bang' physicist Andrew Lange dead at 53

PASADENA, California -- The California Institute of Technology says physicist Andrew Lange, who conducted award-winning research into the remnants of the Big Bang, is dead at age 53.

Caltech's president notified colleagues and students in an internal e-mail that Lange apparently took his own life Friday.

Caltech spokesman Jon Weiner (WY'-ner) on Tuesday referred questions about the circumstances to local police.

Lange was co-leader of a project that in 1998 used a telescope, carried over Antarctica by a balloon, to study the so-called cosmic microwave background -- a gas of thermal radiation left over from the embryonic universe.

Project "Boomerang" showed the spatial geometry of the universe is flat and supported theories that it will expand forever and not collapse upon itself.

Pasadena police did not immediately return calls seeking information.