Time-Frequency Brown Bag Seminar

Wednesday, October 7, 1998

12:30pm

EQuad E415

Speaker: David Spergel, Princeton University

Title: Inferring the History of the Universe from Microwave Background Data

Abstract:

Observations of the microwave background radiation, the left-over heat from the big bang, contain enormous amount of information about physical conditions in the early universe. The launch of NASA MAP satellite (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov) will open a new stage of the study of this background by accurately mapping the entire sky at high angular resolution. There are several challenging numerical problems associated with the interpretation and analysis of the data:
  1. constructing maps from time-ordered data. We actually measure 1e9 temperature differences and then "invert" the observing scheme to produce a 1e6 pixel map (http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9510102)
  2. correcting the maps for sidelobes
  3. inferring cosmological parameters from the maps: we need to compute the angular power spectrum from the maps after imposing sky cuts (http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9805339)
The goal of the talk is to both introduce the science and to outline the mathematical challenges and techniques as well as identify some of the open questions.
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