Join the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton (AAAP) in person at Peyton Hall, Princeton University or on Zoom for the AAAP meeting on Tuesday, September 12 at 7:30pm featuring guest speaker Prof. Suzanne T. Staggs who will present “Looking Backwards with the Cosmic Microwave Background.” Prof. Staggs is a Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. Visit the AAAP website for more information and the Zoom meeting link. https://princetonastronomy.org/ All are welcome. Free to attend.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) emanates from a brilliant plasma that suffused the universe in its first moments. Since the first deliberate measurements of the radiation comprising the CMB in the mid-60s, our capacity to detect and decode its cosmological signatures has increased remarkably. Prof. Staggs will describe the way the CMB encodes information about not only the large-scale dynamics and structure of the universe, but also about its earliest instants and its likely future. To study the largest length scales in the universe, researchers use thousands and thousands of tiny thermometers which measure the fluctuations in the heat delivered by the CMB, and special-purpose telescopes located in some of the most extreme environments on and above the surface of the earth. After describing some of this instrumentation, Prof. Staggs will conclude by discussing future prospects for even more knowledge she and her research team intend to pry from the CMB.
About Prof. Suzanne T. Staggs
Prof. Staggs received her undergraduate degree in physics from Rice University and her PhD in physics from Princeton University. Her thesis advisor was David Wilkinson, one of the leaders of the eponymous Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite. After two years as a Hubble Fellow at the University of Chicago, she joined the faculty at Princeton, where she is currently the Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics. She is the current Principal Investigator (PI) of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), co-director of the Simons Observatory, an American Physical Society fellow, a member of the National Academy of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research focus is the experimental study of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, including precise measurements of its electromagnetic spectrum and thus its blackbody temperature, and exploration of its polarization properties and fine-scale angular anisotropies. Her present CMB work focuses on searching for the signature in the CMB polarization of gravity waves from an inflationary epoch in the primordial universe, and in using the CMB as a backlight to probe the growth of gravitationally-bound structures in the last thirteen billion years. This growth depends on such fundamental quantities as the nature of dark energy, and the mass of the neutrino.
Visit the AAAP website for more information about attending in person at Peyton Hall or for the Zoom link.