#Cosmic background full#

“I think there’s room for surprises.” The telescopesĬMB-S4 is planning to place an array of microwave telescopes at two sites that have been vetted for their scientific value: the Atacama Plateau in Chile and the South Pole.

“I think the richness of the dataset means that it’s going to lead us in new directions, and those directions could be something new and exciting,” McMahon says. The inflation process should have released gravitational waves, fluctuations in space-time that CMB-S4 is designed to detect.Įither detecting or ruling out the presence of primordial gravitational waves “would be a huge advance for our knowledge of the universe,” says Jeff McMahon, an associate professor at the University of Chicago and co-spokesperson for the CMB-S4 collaboration.īut an experiment of this scale and sensitivity would have the potential to do much more, including discover unknown subatomic particles from the early universe, explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy, map the matter in the cosmos, and capture transient phenomena in the microwave sky. “We think that inflation is one of the many hints for resolving the inconsistency between our two great theories of physics,” general relativity and quantum mechanics, says Borrill, who serves as the CMB-S4 project data scientist.Ĭosmic inflation would also explain, among other things, why areas of the universe that otherwise should not have ever been close enough together to affect one another still seem suspiciously similar.

#Cosmic background full#

“We’re developing the full story of the universe from its infancy and creation to the present day.” The science goalsįor many of the over 400 scientists across 121 worldwide institutions who are part of the CMB-S4 collaboration, the most intriguing goal of the experiment is its search for evidence of cosmic inflation.Ĭosmic inflation is a hypothetical event in which the universe rapidly expanded. “From that, we also learn a great deal about what’s in the universe, how it evolved from these quantum fluctuations to all the structure we see. “We’re going back to look for physics from the dawn of time and test the model for how our whole universe was created,” says John Carlstrom, a CMB-S4 project scientist and professor at the University of Chicago. If scientists can pull it off, CMB-S4 will connect a sandy desert with a polar desert to address major astronomical questions. Building it would require unprecedented cooperation between two funding agencies and three scientific communities: astronomy, particle physics and polar science. Now scientists are developing plans for an ambitious project that would multiply by 10 the sensitivity of all these searches combined.Ĭalled Cosmic Microwave Background-Stage 4, the project would comprise an array of small- and large-aperture telescopes deployed in Chile and at the South Pole.

Many experiments, both space- and ground-based, are already studying the CMB. “If we can measure them with enough precision and understand their statistics, we can tease out the entire history of the universe.” “And everything that has ever happened in the universe has left a tiny imprint on those photons it’s changed their distribution and their energies slightly in all kinds of subtle ways. “The fantastic thing about these is they have experienced the entire history of the universe,” says Julian Borrill, a senior scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.