CMB
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Planck Warms Up
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Nearly two-and-a-half years after its launch, the end of ESA’s Planck mission has begun. (In fact, the BBC scooped the rest of the Planck collaboration itself with a story last week; you can read the UK take at the excellent Cardiff-led public Planck site.) Planck’s High-Frequency Instrument (HFI) instrument must be cooled to 0.1 degrees…
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Passion for Light
It’s been a busy few weeks, and that seems like a good excuse for my lack of posts. Since coming back from Scotland, I’ve been to: Paris, for our bi-monthly Planck Core Team meetings, discussing of the state of the data from the satellite, and of our ongoing processing of it; Cambridge, for yet more…
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Copenhagen
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Like my friend and colleague Peter Coles, I am just returned from the fine wine-soaked dinner for the workshop “Cosmology and Astroparticle physics from the LHC to PLANCK” held at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It is an honor to visit the place where so many discoveries of 20th Century physics were made, and…
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EBEX in Flight
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Many of my colleagues in the EBEX experiment have just lit out for the west. Specifically, the team is heading off to Palestine (pronounced “Palesteen“), Texas, to get the telescope and instrument ready for its big Antarctic long-duration balloon flight at the end of the year, when we hope to gather our first real scientific…
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Tacos and Power Spectra in LA
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One of the perks (perqs?) of academia is that occasionally I get an excuse to escape the damp grey of London Winters. The Planck Satellite is an international collaboration and, although largely backed by the European Space Agency, it has a large contribution from US scientists, who built the CMB detectors for Planck’s HFI instrument,…
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Les autres choses (scientifique)
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I’ve been meaning to give a shout-out to my colleagues on the ADAMIS team at the APC (AstroParticule et Cosmologie) Lab at the Université Paris 7 for a while: in addition to doing lots of great work on Planck, EBEX, PolarBear and other important CMB and cosmology experiments, they’ve also been running a group blog…
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Planck: First results
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The Satellite now known as the Planck Surveyor was first conceived in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the results from NASA’s COBE Satellite, the first to detect primordial anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), light from about 400,000 years after the big bang. (I am a relative latecomer to the project, having only…
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Consider a Spherical Cow (Company)
One of my old friends from graduate school, and a colleague to the present day, Lloyd Knox — whom you may remember from such cosmology hits as the Dark Energy Song — has started an initiative to create “short documentary videos to demonstrate the explanatory power of simple physical models and to help us understand…
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BPol++
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I spent part of this week in Paris (apparently at the same time as a large number of other London-based scientists who were here for other things) discussing whether the European CMB community should rally and respond to ESA’s latest call for proposals for a mission to be launched in the next open slot—which isn’t…
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The Planck Sky Previewed
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The Planck Satellite was launched in May 2009, and started regular operations late last summer. This spring, we achieved an important milestone: the satellite has observed the whole sky. To celebrate, the Planck team have released an image of the full sky. The telescope has detectors which can see the sky with 9 bands at…
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