Brief description
The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), relic radiation
from approximately 400\,000 years after the Big Bang, is of crucial
importance in cosmology: temperature variations in the CMBR indicate
density fluctuations in the early Universe -- fluctuations which
grew, under the influence of gravity, to become the galaxy clusters
and superclusters we see today. The statistical properties of the
CMBR temperature distribution provides strong constraints on cosmological
parameters: e.g. the density, curvature and expansion rate of the
Universe. In this experiment students will use the software package
CMBFAST to explore how the pattern of CMBR temperature fluctuations
depends on a number of different cosmological parameters.
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