Cosmic Microwave Background The 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!