I spent part of this week in Paris (apparently at the same time as a large number of other London-based scientists who were here for other things) discussing whether the European CMB community should rally and respond to ESA’s latest call for proposals for a mission to be launched in the next open slot—which isn’t until around 2022. As successful as Planck seems to be, and as fun as it is working with the data, I suspect that no one on the Planck team thinks that a 400-scientist, dispersed, international team coming from a dozen countries each with its own...
The Planck Satellite was launched in May 2009, and started regular operations late last summer. This spring, we achieved an important milestone: the satellite has observed the whole sky. To celebrate, the Planck team have released an image of the full sky. The telescope has detectors which can see the sky with 9 bands at wavelengths ranging from 0.3 millimeters up to nearly a centimeter, out of which we have made this false-color image. The center of the picture is toward the center of the Galaxy, with the rest of the sphere unwrapped into an ellipse so that we can...
The cosmology community has had a terrible few months. I am saddened to report the passing of Andrew Lange, a physicist from CalTech and one of the world’s preeminent experimental cosmologists. Among many other accomplishments, Andrew was one of the leaders of the Boomerang experiment, which made the first large-scale map of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation with a resolution of less than one degree, sufficient to see the opposing action of gravity and pressure in the gas of the early Universe, and to use that to measure the overall density of matter, among many other cosmological properties. He has...
I’m happy to be able to point to ESA’s first post-launch press release from the Planck Surveyor Satellite. Here is a picture of the area of sky that Planck has observed during its “First Light Survey”, superposed on an optical image of the Milky Way galaxy: (Image credit: ESA, LFI and HFI Consortia (Planck); Background image: Axel Mellinger. More pictures are available on the UK Planck Site as well as in French.) The last few months since the launch have been a lot of fun, getting to play with Planck data ourselves. Here at Imperial, our data-processing remit is fairly...
I was sitting in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution at the Science Online London meeting (of which I hope to write more later, but you can retroactively follow the day’s tweets or just search for the day’s tags) when I realized I had missed the fifth anniversary of this blog this past July. So: thanks for your attention for over 400 posts on cosmology, astrophysics, Bayesian probability and probably too much politics and religion. Today is also a much more important date: the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope. Even Google is celebrating. Right now, I’m at a meeting...
[Warning: this post will be fairly technical and political and may only be of interest to those in the field.] I spent the first couple of days this week stuck in a room in Cambridge with about 40 of my colleagues pondering a very important question: what is the future of the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the UK? Organized by Keith Grainge of Cambridge’s MRAO, and held at Cambridge’s new Kavli Institute for Cosmology, the workshop brought together a significant fraction of the UK CMB community, from Cambridge itself, Cardiff, Imperial, Manchester, Oxford and elsewhere. With the...
Not all CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) experiments get launched on a rocket. There’s a long history of telescopes flown from balloons — huge mylar balloons floating over 100,000 feet in the air. MAXIMA and BOOMERaNG, the first experiments to map out the microwave sky on the sub-degree scales containing information about the detailed physical conditions in the Universe over the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. The Planck Satellite will close out that era of CMB experiments, by giving us a complete picture of the microwave sky down to less than a tenth of a degree. But...
The Planck Surveyor Satellite has finished its assembly and testing in Liège, Belgium, and this week was loaded onto a Volga-Dnepr Antonov AN-124 plane, and sent to Kourou, French Guiana, location of the Centre Spatial Guyanais (one of the few places near the Equator politically connected to Europe). It’s due to be launched in tandem with Herschel on April 16. Here are some pictures of the “Planck Transport and Storage Container” making its way on a “Convoi Exceptionnel” to the airstrip. These photos came to me third-hand, so my apologies and thanks to the unknown (to me) photographer....
In today’s Sunday NY Times Magazine, there’s a long article by psychologist Steven Pinker, on “Personal Genomics”, the growing ability for individuals to get information about their genetic inheritance. He discusses the evolution of psychological traits versus intelligence, and highlights the complicated interaction amongst genes, and between genes and society. But what caught my eye was this paragraph: What should I make of the nonsensical news that I… have a “twofold risk of baldness”? … 40 percent of men with the C version of the rs2180439 SNP are bald, compared with 80 percent of men with the T version, and...
A quick pointer to Initiative for Cosmology (iCosmo). The website brings together a bunch of useful calculations for physical cosmology — relatively simple quantities like the relationship between redshift and distance, and also more complicated ones like the power spectrum of density perturbations (which tells us the distribution of galaxies on the largest scales in the Universe) and quantities derived from that like the distortions in the shapes of galaxies due to gravitational lensing, when the path of light from galaxies is perturbed by intervening mass in the Universe. Combined with good documentation and tutorials (and downloadable source), it makes...
OK, not a vacation in the true sense of the word: I’ve been in the US, attending meetings (in Berkeley), workshops (in Santa Fe), conferences (in Pasadena) and, because I can’t seem to escape them, teleconferences everywhere and all the time. Berkeley In Berkeley, I attended the first all-hands collaboration meeting for PolarBear, an experiment that will measure the polarization of the CMB from a telescope that will eventually be situated on the Atacama desert plain in Chile — one of the highest, driest, least accessible places on the earth, and one of the least contaminated with light or radio...
Dick Bond, a friend, mentor and longtime collaborator has won the 2008 Gruber Cosmology prize. Dick’s work has been instrumental at bringing us into this age of “precision cosmology”. He has always concentrated on that interface between theory and observation, making predictions for what we would see in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and how we might best extract that information. The present industry in Cosmological Data Analysis is in no small part down to his ongoing work in the field. To quote the Gruber citation itself: Professor Bond’s work has provided the theoretical framework to interpret the observed inhomogeneities in...
In its continuing bid to take over all aspects of science communication, Nature magazine (or more properly, an alliance between Nature Network and the Royal Institution) will be hosting a European Science Blogging conference in August or September. Right now, however, I’m in Norway. In addition to discussing how we’re going to measure the CMB power spectrum with Planck, I’ve already eaten a slab of reindeer, ran for an hour up and down the snowy hills, and sweated in a sauna....
I spent the week before last in Portugal working with the team designing and building the GEM telescope: The Polarized Galactic Emission Mapping Project in Portugal. GEM (aka GEM-P or even P-GEM-P) aims to measure the emission of our Milky Way galaxy using light at a wavelength of 6 cm. Those frequencies are dominated by synchrotron emission, generated by electrons deflected by the magnetic field of the galaxy. These measurements will give us invaluable information about the structure of the galaxy. Moreover, this emission is an important contaminant for the cosmological maps that experiments like the Planck Surveyor and its...
The Observer featured a lengthy article by Tim Adams bemoaning the generic scientific illiteracy of society today, tracing a line from CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” through Natalie Angier’s new book, The Canon:A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. It concentrates a bit too heavily on uber-agent John Brockman’s somewhat pretentious “Third Culture, a marriage of physics and philosophy, astronomy and art,” as exemplified by his website, The Edge, but it does finger a real and disturbing (but not really new) trend. But to me the real howler was the following quote: George Smoot, the Nobel-winning astrophysicist who first...
We take so much of the web for granted today, we often forget how very contingent it all is. Without the very specific work by Tim Berners-Lee inventing the http protocol, perhaps some sort of hypertext communication standard would have come along, but it’s hard to believe that it would be quite the same. Berners-Lee has always advocated a still more open “read/write” web, and about the closest we come to that is, of course, the weblog. Well, blogs were arguably launched ten years ago, on April 1, 1997, by Dave Winer. Scripting News was an outgrowth of his DaveNet...
Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom of course I had never met here on campus. I also met the site’s editor, Matt Brown, as well as blogger Jennifer Rohn, who also runs the science/culture site LabLit. It’s an ambitious idea, and anything that gets us out of our offices and talking...
I’m just back from a couple of days up in Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities in the UK. London is bigger, more intense, but Edinburgh is more beautiful, dominated by its landscape—London is New York to Edinburgh’s San Francisco. I was up there to give the Edinburgh University Physics “General Interest Seminar”. Mostly, I talked about the physical theory behind and observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, but I was also encouraged to make some philosophical excursions. Needless to say, I talked about Bayesian Probability, and this in turn gave me an excuse to talk about David Hume, my...
OK, this is going to be very technical. In his comment to my last post, my colleague Ned Wright asks a couple of important questions about the way that the Planck Surveyor satellite is going to observe the sky. In the spirit of Mark Trodden’s question about the use of blogs in the research process, let’s see if we can answer these questions in a way that will satisfy Ned (who knows more about observing the CMB than most people on the planet) and not be completely opaque to the rest of my readers. Ned asks: What is the current...
With only [sic] about a year and a half to go before launch, The Observer has a story on the ESA Planck Surveyor mission that I’ve spending much of my time working on over the last several years. (In fact, I have to spend the day writing a program that will play a very small part in working out exactly where the satellite’s detectors are pointing while it’s spinning around in space.) Update: The BBC has got an article that goes more in-depth (and with more Nobel prize-winners, but less of me…)....