![]() ![]() That spacecraft that will, among other things, study the universe’s mysterious dark matter and look for exoplanets in its free time. Spergel has also worked on conducting similar studies with the Atacama Cosmology telescope in the Chilean desert, and is helping to develop and plan the upcoming Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). Theory is easily the hardest part of any project like this, if only because when you’re all done, there’s nothing solid you can hold in your hand - only knowledge in your mind. But that’s the case with David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist who worked as lead theorist on the WMAP team. It’s a big jump from there to the structure of the cosmos, but it’s one he has made.ĭavid Spergel: It says a lot when writing the new planetarium show for the New York Museum of Natural History as well as writing what are currently the two most cited papers in physics and space science are among your lesser accomplishments. Designing and understanding complicated hardware is an act of joy for Jarosik, who once taught a course that required students to disassemble confounding devices like motion detectors and figure out how they work. For WMAP, his work involved developing the spacecraft’s optics-the eyes that produce the images that most nonscientists love best. “You hope it’s not a mistake you’ve made but new physics no one has discovered,” he says. Yes, it might just mean that your methods are a mess, but it can also mean that you’ve done everything right and you’ve found something revolutionary. Norman Jarosik: A senior research physicist and lecturer at Princeton University, Jarosik is never quite as happy when an experiment he’s running produces all the wrong results. Of working with such a small group to study such profound secrets he says: “It was quite a feeling to be in a room with less than 30 people who were the only ones in the world to know the age of the universe.” But everything the WMAP scientists learn, they share with that world. “Data analyst” is usually a job that doesn’t make news, but in Hinshaw’s case it meant he was responsible for mapping the raw numbers the team was receiving from the spacecraft onto an overall cosmic atlas, creating what has been called “a baby picture of the universe.” He is also lead author or co-author of all of the significant papers the WMAP tam produced. ![]() Gary Hinshaw: Now an astrophysics professor with the University of British Columbia, Hinshaw was lead data analyst with the WMAP team. ![]() He is well positioned to puzzle out what those differences mean. Any inconsistencies between the COBE findings and the WMAP findings can be seen as a feature not a bug of Bennett’s work, with a later, more versatile spacecraft building on the findings of an earlier one. He started a lot earlier than COBE - becoming a ham radio operator as a boy and then losing himself in the study of radio waves in general. That’s the physics equivalent of starring on one Super Bowl team and then going on to coach another. Of the 27 people who are part of the WMAP team, five are being recognized.Ĭhuck Bennett: Before being tapped to lead Johns Hopkins University’s portion of the WMAP program, Bennett was a deputy principal investigator for the earlier Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft. Their findings are only beginning to be analyzed for what they teach us about cosmological physics and the origins of everything. That’s what the team of scientists behind the NASA spacecraft known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) accomplished during the nine years the ship operated from 2001 to 2010. 003% of its current 13.7 billion year age. But that newly discovered fact becomes a lot more interesting when you realize that by knowing it, we now have a better idea than ever how old the universe is, what its shape is, what it’s made of and how it looked in its infancy, when it was just. It’s not easy to get worked up about the fact that the temperature of the universe varies by 200 millionths of a degree on the Kelvin scale from place to place. Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |