Cosmic Microwave Background

Cosmic Microwave Cosmic Microwave BackgroundBackground

The 2006 Nobel PrizesThe 2006 Nobel Prizes

This year’s laureates John C. Mather, Senior Astrophysicist at NASA’s

Goddard Space Flight Center, MD

George F. Smoot, Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley

“For their discovery of the basic form of the cosmic microwave background radiation as well as its small variations in different directions. The very detailed observations that the Laureates have carried out from the COBE satellite have played a major role in the development of modern cosmology into a precise science.”

Memoirs J. C. Mather and J. Boslough, “The Very First Light,” 1996

G. Smoot and K. Davidson, “Wrinkles in Time,” 1993

Outline Introduction The cosmic microwave background The COBE project Further work – The Wilkinson Microwave Asymmetry Probe A quick survey of modern cosmology The origin of microwave anisotropies Interpretation of data The concordant picture

COBE Instrumentation Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) – Maps

variations in the CMB

Far-InfraRed Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) – Measures the spectrum of the CMB

Diffuse InfraRed Background Experiment (DIRBE) – Maps dust emission

2.73 degrees

Not with a whimper

Composition of the Universe

Yes!