The Infant Universe

By Trish Barker

Data gathered by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe reveal temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) from shortly after the Big Bang.

For cosmologists, the immensity of the universe provides a time machine, allowing them to observe aspects of the early universe by observing radiation that has traveled billions of light-years to reach our galaxy. Cosmic microwave background (CMB), the uniform backdrop of the universe, has been traveling for around 13 billion years, since shortly after the Big Bang.

"The CMB is the one way we can look back to see the universe at its very early stages," explained Benjamin Wandelt, an assistant professor astronomy and physics at UIUC and an NCSA faculty fellow. Wandelt discussed his fellowship project, titled "Parallel Algorithms for Cosmological Statistics," at a brown bag lecture on Dec. 3.

The CMB was first observed in the 1960s and is now the subject of numerous research efforts around the world. "This is the decade of the cosmic microwave background," Wandelt said. From observations of ancient temperature fluctuations in the CMB, cosmologists try to infer basic characteristics of the early universe, such as its geometry and energy density, the history of star formation, and the ratio of the baryon particles that make up conventional matter to the mysterious so-called "dark matter."

"These things are cosmological gold," Wandelt said.

Mining that gold requires sifting through a flood of data and working with computationally intensive calculations. Wandelt and his research team have developed efficient algorithms to extract statistical information from the CMB data collected by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). During his NCSA fellowship, Wandelt is working with NCSA's Scientific Computing Division and is using NCSA computational resources to analyze the CMB.

For more information on Wandelt's fellowship project, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Divisions/DirOffice/CampusRelations/FFP/FifthSet.html#Project7. More information on his work can be found at http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/People/Faculty/profiles/wandelt/.

Access Online | Posted 12-16-2003