CMB
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Nobel Prize 2006: The Cosmic Microwave Background
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News flash: John Mather and George Smoot, two of the scientists behind the COBE Satellite, have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their measurements of the average temperature of the CMB and the fluctuations about that average. (Here’s one self-aggrandizing reason why I find this particularly exciting.) The average, measured by the FIRAS…
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More cosmology prizes
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The Balzan prize, worth 1,000,000 Swiss Francs, was just awarded to Andrew Lange and Paolo de Bernardis for their work as the original Principal Investigators of Boomerang, which, in 2000, produced the first high-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background and allowed a definitive measurement of the curvature of the Universe, in the sense of…
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Quick update
Sorry I’ve been silent… here’s a quick update: I’m in Pasadena, California, working at JPL and Caltech on various tasks related to the Planck Surveyor Cosmic Microwave Background satellite, to be launched in a couple of years (which means “soon” in this game). I’m sure you’re waiting breathlessly to hear my commentary on such crucial…
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Cosmology in the Mediterranean
Like fellow-blogger Mark Trodden , I’ve just spent the week at scientific meetings in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. The first half of the week was for the yearly consortium meeting of the Planck Surveyor satellite. Although still endangered by further delays, we expect the satellite to be launched in early or…
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WMAP
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As promised, the team behind the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite have released their lovely new results. WMAP measures fluctuations in the CMB (which I’ve already written about a lot), and in 2003 they released high-resolution, high-sensitivity maps of the CMB over the whole sky. Today, they updated those maps, and also released new…
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WMAP results due soon!
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After a couple of years of waiting, the team behind the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite seem ready to release some new results. WMAP measures fluctuations in the CMB (which I’ve already written about a lot), and in 2003 they released high-resolution, high-sensitivity maps of the CMB over the whole sky. (New results have…
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The BBC, the Big Bang and WMAP
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For some reason, the BBC’s Today Program had a feature on the Big Bang and its purported problems confronting modern data. Apart from the woefully misguided Eric Lerner, the discussion was relatively nuanced and at least attempted to distinguish between a wrong theory and an incomplete one — the questions that the Big Bang, as…
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Quote of the day (experts only)
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The ΛCDM Model requires two pieces of unknown physics. One is ‘Λ’ and the other is ‘CDM’ -Tom Shanks, at “Open Questions in Cosmology“, a meeting being held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Garching, Germany. I’ll explain later.
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Boomerang
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A couple of weeks ago, my colleagues in the Boomerang Collaboration, spread out over the US, Italy, Canada, France and the UK, released five papers analyzing the data from the latest flight of the Boomerang instrument, over Antarctica in January 2003 (check this out for information from my fellow Boomerangers on what it’s like down…
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