Podcaster: Dr. Renée Hložek
Title: Current Challenges in CMB Cosmology
Organization: The Society of Physics Students (SPS) at The University of Central Arkansas
Link : The Society of Physics Students (SPS) at The University of Central Arkansas
Description: CMB cosmology is currently undergoing a data rich epoch, with measurements on small scales from experiments like The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and it polarisation instrument ACTPol adding to measurements on larger scales by Planck, WMAP and most recently BICEP. I will contextualise the measurements and present constraints on parameters from the observations at 148 and 217 GHz respectively by ACT from three years of observations. I will discuss the model of secondary anisotropies that are needed to fit the data in small scales, including contributions from both the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, Poisson distributed and correlated infrared sources, radio sources and a term modeling the correlation between the thermal SZ effect and the Cosmic Infrared Background. I’ll discuss my recent re-analysis of data from the Planck satellite, and discuss a re-analysis of the Planck data, where we found that the 217GHz x 217GHz detector set spectrum used in the Planck analysis is responsible for some of the tension between the Planck parameters and other astronomical measurements. We show evidence suggesting residual systematics in the detector set spectra used in the Planck likelihood code, which is substantially reduced for our spectra. We put these results in context of the recent BICEP results. I’ll highlight the recent ACTPol results, and highlight what we might expect from the upcoming Planck polarisation results.
Bio: The Society of Physics Students (SPS) at The University of Central Arkansas is incorporates outreach, demonstrations, tutoring and guest speakers into our SPS Chapter.
Dr. Renée Hložek is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. When she did this hangout, she was postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University
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365 Days of Astronomy
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