WMAP
Tag archives for WMAP
The Science of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Posted by Ethan on March 27, 2013 
“The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.” -Stephen Hawking One of the most powerful predictions of the Big Bang — the…
What Everyone Should Know about the Universe on the eve of Planck
Posted by Ethan on March 20, 2013 
“Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.” -Max Planck Tomorrow morning, at 8 AM my time, the press conference that cosmologists have spent the past decade waiting for will finally happen, and the Planck satellite — the…
Hole in the Universe? What Hole?
Posted by Ethan on May 20, 2008 Some of you who’ve been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant “void” in the Universe. What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this, and…
A Discovery of Gravitational Waves?
Posted by Ethan on April 4, 2008 Two summers ago, I was in Les Houches, France, for a summer school that turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. Seriously, we’d wake up every day and this was the view from the school: Well, the University/Institution that ran the school sends periodic updates to me. And they linked…
WMAP results: Cosmology from the CMB
Posted by Ethan on March 6, 2008 The cosmic microwave background is the radiation left over from the big bang. It’s very uniform, 2.725 Kelvin everywhere. We’re moving with respect to it, so there’s a doppler shift, and we see that as a dipole moment in the Temperature. When we subtract that out, we see variations on the order of 30 microKelvins!…
