1. principles
  2. WMAP Data Release

WMAP Data Release

By drorzel on March 16, 2006.

If you'd like some actual science from your ScienceBlogs, here's the big news in the physical sciences today: The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team has released a bunch of new data on the latest observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the relic radiation from the Big Bang whose temperature fluctuations tell scientists something about the distribution of matter in the universe several billion years ago, very shortly after the Big Bang.

Detailed analysis of these data provides some of the tightest constraints on our current models of the early universe. Steinn Sigurdsson is your go-to guy for information about the release, including a nice WMAP for Dummies post. My quick impression of looking at the WMAP posts on various physics-type blogs is that there's nothing terribly shocking, but there's a lot of nice, chewy data to work with here.

Science marches on, even when there's basketball to watch.

Tags
Astronomy

More like this

What Happened Before The Big Bang?
“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe -- as a cosmologist -- isn't quite about the Big Bang in and of itself. The expansion of the Universe in reverse; image…
Looking at the Universe with PLANCK
"To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us…
WMAP year 7: We Know What We're Doing!
The New Age? It's just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds. -James Randi About two weeks ago, the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) team released their seven-year results, and I'm finally ready to tell you all about it. WMAP, remember, is this guy. By looking at two…
WMAP results: Cosmology from the CMB
The cosmic microwave background is the radiation left over from the big bang. It's very uniform, 2.725 Kelvin everywhere. We're moving with respect to it, so there's a doppler shift, and we see that as a dipole moment in the Temperature. When we subtract that out, we see variations on the order of…