Staring at the 'Baby Picture' of our Universe: The Cosmic Microwave Background

Since it's discovery in 1965, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has proven to be a scientific goldmine in cosmology. It constitutes the oldest and most distant light that we can detect, being emitted when the universe was only 379,000 years old. It constitutes one of the main pillars of the actual cosmological model, allowing for a very precise measurement of its parameters. In this talk, Pedro will give a brief glimpse in the history of the Universe, introduce what information we can obtain from the CMB, and what various missions have measured. To conclude, he will discuss what the future of observational cosmology could hold.

Pedro Villalba-González (he/him) was born in Granada in 1999. He was a physics undergraduate at the University of Granada and is currently a second year physics graduate student at UBC and a Rafael del Pino Excellence Scholar. He works on observational cosmology, concretely in the Canadian Galactic Emission Mapper (CGEM) project, a radiotelescope which will help us search for gravitational radiation from the early Universe.