Final Report Summary - FPCMB (Fundamental Physics from the Cosmic Microwave Background)
The project involved our team of post-docs and students analyzing both ACT and Planck data, in particular developing new methods to remove contamination from extragalactic and Galactic foregrounds: light that obscures the more distant signal we are looking for. One of our new methods produced the most iconic figures showing the cosmological data from the Planck satellite combined with ground-based experimental data.
We also developed optimum ways to describe the cosmological data in order to extract cosmological parameters. In doing so we found that no model fits the current data better than our current ‘concordance’ model, known as LambdaCDM, which is a flat universe filled with baryons, photons, dark matter, neutrinos, and a cosmological constant. We obtained new and stringent limits on the number of neutrino species in the universe, excluding one or more additional species at high confidence.