Tuesday, April 2, 2013

The Trenches of Discovery: The universe as seen by Planck - Day one

I am currently attending the ESA run conference "The Universe as seen by Planck". I will be trying to write a summary each day of what I found interesting. To read about my motivation for this, please read yesterday's post. Below is the summary of the first day's talks. I apologise if the posts this week are overly technical. I don't have much time for writing these and this is the best I can do given the constraints. As always, if you don't understand, just ask questions in the comments.

Overall summary

Today was mostly about introducing the Planck experiment and its data. This is the first conference ESA has held since the data was released and in fact the first conference about Planck open to non-Planck scientists like myself at all. Therefore today was actually the first chance for the Planck collaboration to be honest about what their telescope has and has not been able to do. As a result, many of the talks that can lead to the most speculation will not come until tomorrow and Thursday. Still, there were some interesting things to come out of today. For example:

Read the rest at--->The Trenches of Discovery