Astronomy Blog

WMAP at 5

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - WMAP to its friends - is a NASA spacecraft which observes the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) left-over from around 300,000 years after the big bang. WMAP has just released what is called the "five year" data set (spotted via Andrew Jaffe). That means it includes five years worth of calibrated observations of the entire sky at microwave wavelengths. That was a huge job! Along with the data come some interesting papers. Unfortunately it is late, and I am hungry, so I'll have to leave them until tomorrow. Congratulations to the WMAP team.