HMC Physics Colloquium

Tuesdays at 16:30 in Shanahan Center for Teaching and Learning, Room B460

Ned Wright

University of California at Los Angeles

Observing the Origin of the Universe

Nov. 11, 2008

In the past century our knowledge about the Universe went from one fact - the sky is dark at night - to hundreds of facts from the Cosmic Microwave Background, observations of distant supernovae, and baryon oscillations.

We now know the Universe is so big that we can see nearly all the way back to the origin of the Universe by observing the "oldest light in the Universe," which is the CMB. From this we can infer the processes that occurred during the first picosecond after the Big Bang that produced the seeds that grew to form galaxies and large scale structure.