Planet Blog!

What is CMBE?


One of the most powerful tools to study physics of the universe is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light of the universe. It was produced around 400,000 years after inflation and provides a picture of the universe at its infant stage. As such, we can use the CMB to probe inflation, particles produced at extremely high energies, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Furthermore, as the CMB photons travel to us, their paths get deflected by the intervening gravitational potentials of the cosmic web, and some of them get scattered by hot gas in galaxy groups, and clusters. Known as gravitational lensing and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect respectively, these phenomena enrich the CMB as a probe of both the growth of structure and early universe physics. KIPAC scientists are leaders of and contributors to several current- and next-generation CMB experiments that advance the precisions in the measurements of our millimeter-wave sky.