CMB
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Andrew Lange, Huan Tran
The cosmology community has had a terrible few months. I am saddened to report the passing of Andrew Lange, a physicist from CalTech and one of the world’s preeminent experimental cosmologists. Among many other accomplishments, Andrew was one of the leaders of the Boomerang experiment, which made the first large-scale map of the Cosmic Microwave…
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Planck’s First Light
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I’m happy to be able to point to ESA’s first post-launch press release from the Planck Surveyor Satellite. Here is a picture of the area of sky that Planck has observed during its “First Light Survey”, superposed on an optical image of the Milky Way galaxy: (Image credit: ESA, LFI and HFI Consortia (Planck); Background…
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Blogging Anniversary, and Other Celebrations
I was sitting in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution at the Science Online London meeting (of which I hope to write more later, but you can retroactively follow the day’s tweets or just search for the day’s tags) when I realized I had missed the fifth anniversary of this blog this past July.…
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Hanging together? — The future of the CMB in the UK
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[Warning: this post will be fairly technical and political and may only be of interest to those in the field.] I spent the first couple of days this week stuck in a room in Cambridge with about 40 of my colleagues pondering a very important question: what is the future of the study of the…
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Another launch
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Not all CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) experiments get launched on a rocket. There’s a long history of telescopes flown from balloons — huge mylar balloons floating over 100,000 feet in the air. MAXIMA and BOOMERaNG, the first experiments to map out the microwave sky on the sub-degree scales containing information about the detailed physical conditions…
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Loading Planck
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The Planck Surveyor Satellite has finished its assembly and testing in Liège, Belgium, and this week was loaded onto a Volga-Dnepr Antonov AN-124 plane, and sent to Kourou, French Guiana, location of the Centre Spatial Guyanais (one of the few places near the Equator politically connected to Europe). It’s due to be launched in tandem…
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Bayesian Inference in the NY Times
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In today’s Sunday NY Times Magazine, there’s a long article by psychologist Steven Pinker, on “Personal Genomics”, the growing ability for individuals to get information about their genetic inheritance. He discusses the evolution of psychological traits versus intelligence, and highlights the complicated interaction amongst genes, and between genes and society. But what caught my eye…
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iCosmo
A quick pointer to Initiative for Cosmology (iCosmo). The website brings together a bunch of useful calculations for physical cosmology — relatively simple quantities like the relationship between redshift and distance, and also more complicated ones like the power spectrum of density perturbations (which tells us the distribution of galaxies on the largest scales in…
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What I did on my Summer Vacation, part I
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OK, not a vacation in the true sense of the word: I’ve been in the US, attending meetings (in Berkeley), workshops (in Santa Fe), conferences (in Pasadena) and, because I can’t seem to escape them, teleconferences everywhere and all the time. Berkeley In Berkeley, I attended the first all-hands collaboration meeting for PolarBear, an experiment…
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Gruber Cosmology Prize 2008: Dick Bond
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Dick Bond, a friend, mentor and longtime collaborator has won the 2008 Gruber Cosmology prize. Dick’s work has been instrumental at bringing us into this age of “precision cosmology”. He has always concentrated on that interface between theory and observation, making predictions for what we would see in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and how we…
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