Seminario DAS // "The Simons Observatory"

Speaker: Dr. Jo Dunkley
Affiliation: Princeton

Abstract: The Simons Observatory (SO), a new millimeter-wave observatory in the Atacama, has started gathering data. It measures the cosmic microwave background, the earliest image we have of the universe, while also surveying the polarized millimeter sky. Its largest telescope will map half the sky at arcminute resolution, overlapping with the Rubin survey and providing a route to mapping the cosmic web of gas and dark matter, including galaxy clusters. It will also observe the Galaxy and over a hundred thousand extragalactic sources. By surveying half the sky every couple of days, we hope to see new types of transient astronomical events in millimeter-wavelengths, and track the light-curves of thousands of active galactic nuclei. SO’s smaller telescopes are seeking a signal imprinted by gravitational waves generated in the early universe. I will describe SO's current status and show some early data.