APS: Cool waves
This morning David Spergel of Princeton University ran through the many achievements of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe for the assembled physicists in Jacksonville. This probe measures temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background – the oldest light in the universe. Since its launch in 2001 it has confirmed six predictions of the inflation model of big bang cosmology, including the fact that the universe is flat.
The next big quarry for the team is detecting gravitational waves in the WMAP data. They still have another two years of data from their five-year dataset to analyse before the mission ends in September 2009. Spergel is confident they will provide an upper limit on gravitational waves, even if they don’t discover them directly. After that we can expect the Planck mission, which will have three times the resolution and ten times the sensitivity of WMAP, to pick up the challenge.