Graduate Student Seminar with Jared May on The CMB and How We Observe the Earliest Light in the Universe

380,000 years after the big bang, the universe ceased being an opaque plasma and became large enough that photons started free-streaming through space. We observe this today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Within the CMB lie details about the structure of the cosmic web, the geometry of our universe, dark matter, neutrino masses, as well as the physics and conditions of our primordial universe. Measuring the CMB to higher precision, varying angular scales, and multiple frequencies is necessary in understanding these physics. Spider and Taurus are two balloon-borne CMB experiments whose goals include mapping the CMB and the contaminating foregrounds to better constrain ɅCDM model parameters and to hunt for B-mode polarization - “smoking gun” evidence for the inflationary model of our universe.