University of Pennsylvania Astrophysics - Cosmology Seminar

Talks are given on topics of current interest, at a level that is accessible to all first-year graduate students. This event is attended by all those interested in astrophysics and cosmology, including undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. ABSTRACT: The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has mapped the microwave sky to arcminute scales. We present constraints on parameters from the observations at 148 and 217 GHz respectively by ACT from three years of observations. Efficient map-making and spectrum-estimation techniques allow us to probe the acoustic peaks deep into the damping tail, and allow for confirmation of the concordance model, and tests for deviations from the standard cosmological picture. We fit a model of primary cosmological and secondary foreground parameters to the dataset, including contributions from both the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, Poisson distributed and correlated infrared sources, radio sources and a term modeling the correlation between the thermal SZ effect and the Cosmic Infrared Background. We will present constraints on a variety of cosmological parameters using the 3-year ACT dataset. We'll also put these results in context with the recent results from the Planck satellite, and discuss a reanalysis of the Planck data.