cosmology

From Five Books, March 30, 2020: Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper gives his recommendations for books on the Big Bang and talks about whether our entire understanding of the universe is about to be turned upside down.

From Kane County Chronicle, Feb. 24, 2020: Join Fermilab scientist emeritus Paul Mantsch at the St. Charles Public Library on Tuesday, Feb. 25, at 7 p.m. as he explains how the realms of the atom and the cosmos are intimately connected to each other – and to us. This special presentation will feature the story of discovery at Fermilab: past, present, future.

From The Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast, Feb. 14, 2020: What happened at the dawn of the universe, just trillionths of a second after the start of the big bang, remains a mystery. Revisiting these moments in his new book, “At the Edge of Time,” Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper explores many of the unknowns in cosmology. Hooper guides Ian Sample through the birth of our universe to its enigmatic constituents of dark matter and dark energy in this 22-minute podcast episode.

Reina Reyes made headlines for her research at Princeton testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity; now she’s home in the Philippines, using her physics background to make her mark in different ways.

There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make it in a lab? What kinds of particles is it made of? Is it made of more than one kind of particle? Is it even made of particles at all? Still, although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark.

From UChicago News, Feb. 6, 2020: Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Brad Benson and colleagues use a different method to calculate the masses of distant galaxies: the polarization, or orientation, of the light left over from the moments after the Big Bang. In doing so, they demonstrate how to “weigh” galaxy clusters using light from the earliest moments of the universe — a new method that could help shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.

For the first time, a team of scientists has used the orientation of light left over from the early universe to detect gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters – the bending of light around these massive objects. Using gravitational lensing data taken by the South Pole Telescope and the Dark Energy Camera, Fermilab scientist Brad Benson and colleagues have demonstrated a new way to “weigh” galaxy clusters and ultimately shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.

From New Scientist, Dec. 11, 2019: Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper is quoted in this article on what scientists mean when they talk about the Big Bang. The best evidence for the big bang is all around us in the cosmic microwave background, the radiation released once the universe had cooled sufficiently for atoms to form, when it was about 380,000 years old. And that is the point: everywhere in today’s universe was where the big bang was.