Speaker: Will Percival
Location: Cody Astronomical Society, Farnborough
A background of microwave light is seen at a nearly constant strength in all directions in the night sky. This is the light “left-over” from the big-bang, and has been traveling for 13.7 Billion years before reaching the satellites and telescopes dedicated to its observation. Small fluctuations in the wavelength of the light can reveal the state of the Universe when the light was emitted, and any interesting events along the path taken. The Planck satellite (sci.esa.int/planck/), a ESA mission, scheduled for launch early in 2009, will observe the cosmic microwave background in unprecedented detail, and will tell us a great deal about the Universe. However, it will not answer every question that we have, and will not significantly add to our knowledge on dark matter and energy – constituents of the Universe that we currently know little about. This lecture will discuss this experiment and some of the current challenges in observational cosmology.