Planck
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Planck: Demographics and Diversity
Another aspect of Planck’s legacy bears examining. A couple of months ago, the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology was awarded to the Planck Satellite. This was (I think) a well-deserved honour for all of us who have worked on Planck during the more than 20 years since its conception, for a mission which confirmed a…
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(Almost) The end of Planck
This week, we released (most of) the final set of papers from the Planck collaboration — the long-awaited Planck 2018 results (which were originally meant to be the “Planck 2016 results”, but everything takes longer than you hope…), available on the ESA website as well as the arXiv. More importantly for many astrophysicists and cosmologists,…
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WMAP Breaks Through
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It was announced this morning that the WMAP team has won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which infamously is only awarded to three people each year, the Breakthrough Prize was awarded to the whole 27-member WMAP team, led by Chuck Bennett, Gary Hinshaw, Norm Jarosik, Lyman Page, and David Spergel, but…
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Gravitational Waves?
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[Uh oh, this is sort of disastrously long, practically unedited, and a mixture of tutorial- and expert-level text. Good luck. Send corrections.] It’s been almost exactly a year since the release of the first Planck cosmology results (which I discussed in some depth at the time). On this auspicious anniversary, we in the cosmology community…
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The next generation of large satellites: PRISM and/or eLISA?
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Today was the deadline for submitting so-called “White Papers” proposing the next generation of the European Space Agency satellite missions. Because of the long lead times for these sorts of complicated technical achievements, this call is for launches in the faraway years of 2028 or 2034. (These dates would be harder to wrap my head…
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Planck 2013: the PR
Yesterday’s release of the Planck papers and data wasn’t just aimed at the scientific community, of course. We wanted to let the rest of the world know about our results. The main press conference was at ESA HQ in Paris, and there was a smaller event here in London run by the UKSA, which I…
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Planck 2013: the science
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If you’re the kind of person who reads this blog, then you won’t have missed yesterday’s announcement of the first Planck cosmology results. The most important is our picture of the cosmic microwave background itself: But it takes a lot of work to go from the data coming off the Planck satellite to this picture.…
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Breaking the silence (updated)
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My apologies for being far too busy to post. I’ll be much louder in couple of weeks once we release the Planck data — on March 21. Until then, I have to shut up and follow the Planck rules. OK, back to editing. (I’ll try to update this post with any advance information as it…
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Traversant la Manche
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Until now, I have been forced to resist the clamour brewing among both members of my extensive readership (hi, dad!) to post a bit more often: my excuse is that, in the little over a month between early September and mid-October, I have travelled back and forth from Paris to London five times, spent a…
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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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