Related papers: Cosmology from Cosmic Microwave Background fluctua…

The ESA Planck satellite, launched on May 14th, 2009, is the third generation space mission dedicated to the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the first light in the Universe. Planck observes the full sky in nine…

I briefly review some of the main scientific outputs expected from the upcoming Planck mission. Planck will map the CMB sky with 5' resolution and $\mu$K sensitivity, with minimal foreground contribution and superb control on systematics.…

An extremely sensitive all-sky survey will be carried out in the millimetre/submillimetre waveband by the forthcoming ESA mission Planck Surveyor. The main scientific goal of the mission is to make very accurate measurements of the spatial…

Polarization of the cosmic microwave background, though not yet detected, provides a source of information about cosmological parameters complementary to temperature fluctuations. This paper provides a complete theoretical treatment of…

These lecture from the 100th Les Houches summer school on "Post-planck cosmology" of July 2013 discuss some aspects of the Planck mission, whose prime objective was a very accurate measurement of the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic…

I review the discovery of the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The underlying theory and the implications for cosmology are reviewed, and I describe the prospects for future progress.

The successful European Space Agency (ESA) Planck mission has mapped the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy with unprecedented accuracy. However, Planck was not designed to detect the polarised components of the CMB…

Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) allow high precision observation of the cosmic plasma at redshift z~1100. After the success of the NASA satellite COBE, that in 1992 provided the first detection of the CMB anisotropy,…

Planck's Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization observations are the premier dataset for constraining cosmological models. Cosmic variance limited temperature at large and intermediate scales today dominates the…

In this paper, we discuss why and how the Planck mission, originally designed and proposed for mapping CMB intensity fluctuations, has been revised for polarisation measurement capability as well.

Multi-frequency, high resolution, full sky measurements of the anisotropy in both temperature and polarisation of the cosmic microwave background radiation are the goals of the satellite missions MAP (NASA) and Planck (ESA). The ultimate…

Although the Planck Surveyor mission is optimized to map the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, it will also provide extremely valuable information on astrophysical phenomena. We review our present understanding of Galactic and…

Measurement of cosmic microwave background polarization is today a major goal of observational cosmology. The level of the signal to measure, however, makes it very sensitive to various systematic effects. In the case of Planck, which…

The Planck collaboration has measured the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background well enough to determine the locations of eight peaks in the temperature (TT) power spectrum, five peaks in the polarization (EE)…

In this thesis we investigate several aspects related to the theory of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a new algorithm to calculate the angular power spectrum of the anisotropies which is two orders of magnitude…

A fundamental requirement in the new generation of high resolution Cosmic Microwave Background imaging experiments is a strict control of systematic errors that must be kept at micro-K level in the final maps. Some of these errors are of…

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which was dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched on 14 May 2009. It scanned the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously between 12 August 2009…

In the context of current and future microwave surveys mainly dedicated to the accurate mapping of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), mm and sub-mm emissions from Solar System will represent a potential source of contamination as well as an…

This set of lectures provides an overview of the basic theory and phenomenology of the cosmic microwave background. Topics include a brief historical review; the physics of temperature and polarization fluctuations; acoustic oscillations of…

We present a brief review of the main results of the Planck 2015 release describing the new calibration of the data, showing the maps delivered in temperature and, for the first time, in polarization, the cosmological parameters and the…