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From Big Bang to Big Data
How the CMB Power spectrum explains the geometry and matter-energy content of the universe
I’ve been working on an astrophysics seminar these past several weeks. The topic, as the title of this story suggests, is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the WMAP and Planck mission teachings. One of the most interesting things that I learned while researching this topic is something called the CMB power spectrum, which I’ll describe later on in this story in more detail. But in short — the power spectrum reveals a great deal about the early and current state of the universe. What I want to do here is explain, as un-technically as possible, what the CMB power spectrum is, how scientists plotted it, and what we can infer from the graph.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the oldest light in the universe, a primitive glow that has persisted as a remnant from nearly 380,000 years following the Big Bang. The history of the CMB began quite by accident in the 1960s, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two scientists who were working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ Holmdel Observatory, heard an odd faint static noise coming periodically from their antenna. Initially blamed on pigeons roosting close to them (they called it white dielectric material according to some anecdotes), they later became a historic find…
