Current Status and Perspectives of Cosmic Microwave Background Observations
Abstract
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a unique opportunity for a direct study of the primordial cosmic plasma at redshift z ~1000. The angular power spectra of temperature and polarisation fluctuations are powerful observational objectives as they encode information on fundamental cosmological parameters and on the physics of the early universe. A large number of increasingly ambitious balloon-borne and ground-based experiments have been carried out following the first detection of CMB anisotropies by COBE-DMR, probing the angular power spectrum up to high multipoles. The recent data from WMAP provide a new major step forward in measurements percision. The ESA mission Planck Surveyor, to be launched in 2007, is the third-generation satellite devoted to CMB imaging. Planck is expected to extract the full cosmological information from temperature anisotropies and to open up new fronteers in the CMB field.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0310089,
title = {Current Status and Perspectives of Cosmic Microwave Background Observations},
author = {Marco Bersanelli and Davide Maino and Aniello Mennella},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0310089},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
6 pages, 1 figure, to appear in "Proc of International Symposium on Plasmas in the Laboratory and in the Universe: new insights and new challenges", September 16-19, 2003, Como, Italy