The Scientific Programme of Planck
By the PLANCK-HFI Collaboration. 2006
207 citations recorded by the source corpus.
For 40 years, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been the most important source of information about the geometry and contents of the Universe. Even so, only a small fraction of the information available in the CMB has been extracted to date. Planck, the third space CMB mission after COBE and WMAP, is designed to extract essentially all of the information in the CMB temperature anisotropies. Planck will also measure to high accuracy the polarization of CMB anisotropies, which encodes not only a wealth of cosmological information but also provides a unique probe of the thermal history of the Universe during the time when the first stars and galaxies formed. Polarization measurements may also detect the signature of a stochastic background of gravitational waves generated during inflation, 10^(-35) s after the Big Bang. This book describes the expected scientific output of the Planck mission, both cosmological and non-cosmological. Chapter 1 summarizes the experimental concept and the operation of the satellite. Chapter 2 covers the core cosmological science of the mission, describing the measurements that Planck will make, what we expect to learn from them about the geometry and contents of the Universe and about fundamental physics, and the combination of CMB data with other data to provide additional insights. Although the primary goal of Planck is cosmology, it will survey the whole sky with an unprecedented combination of frequency coverage, angular resolution, and sensitivity, providing data valuable for a broad range of astrophysics. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe non-cosmological astrophysical uses of the Planck data. This book can also be downloaded directly from http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck .
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fe4f38eb271eeb360418f293237acfea363a059
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Primordial Non-Gaussianity and Bispectrum Measurements in the Cosmic Microwave Background and Large-Scale Structure (2010, background): “However Planck optical simulations (e.g. Sandri et al., 2004) show that in reality we have to deal with elliptic beams, characterized by a non-trivial azimuthal dependence.”
- SPTpol: an instrument for CMB polarization measurements with the South Pole Telescope (2012, methodology): “Overplotted are projected constraints from Planck .(12) Solid model curves in the BB plot are for Σmν = 0, with r = 0 and r = 0.”