Thursday, February 26, 2015, 16:00
WHGA/Auditorium
Marc Türler, University of Geneva
Abstract:
The Planck satellite of the European Space Agency was launched in 2009 to measure the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy. This first light - freed 380'000 years after the Big Bang - provides key information on the universe as a whole, its fundamental constituents and its past and future evolution.The Planck Collaboration - including individuals from more than 100 scientific institutes in Europe, the USA and Canada - has released the data of the first 15.5 months of the mission in March 2013 together with 31 scientific papers. The full mission data including for the first time polarization measurements were finally released on 5 February 2015. After an introduction on the CMB and the Planck mission, I will present a selection of the new results published in the currently available subset of the 28 papers of this 2015 release, as well as the results of the joint BICEP2/Keck/Planck paper.