Physical Society Colloquium

Cosmology from the Cosmic Microwave Background

Joanna Dunkley

Department of Physics
University of Oxford

The Cosmic Microwave Background is relic light from the early universe. It is a powerful cosmological probe, allowing us to measure the contents, age, geometry, and evolution of the universe, and to probe the earliest moments after the Big Bang. I will describe how this is done, and show the latest observational results from NASA's WMAP satellite, and from ground-based telescopes. I will focus on new results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, which has mapped the microwave sky to arcminute scales, discussing its implications for inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. I will describe how ACT complements the Planck satellite, from which results are imminent, as well as describing prospects and plans for ACT's successor - the upgraded ACTPol telescope.