Joint Astrophysical Colloquium
The Planck Legacy and beyond
Nazzareno (Reno) Mandolesi (INAF-OAS and University of Ferrara)
Tuesday 02/10/2018 @ 11:30, Conference Hall of the CNR Convention center
It was 21 March 2013 when ESA’s Planck mission revealed its ‘image’ of the cosmos. By observing this radiation known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and measuring the tiny CMB anisotropies across the sky, Planck’s image had the ability to provide us the information about the birth, the evolution, the age, and contents of the Universe. It is the cosmic blueprint. Two NASA missions, COBE in the early 1990s and WMAP in the following decade, had already performed an analogous set of sky surveys that resulted in similar images. But those images did not have the precision and angular resolution of Planck. The new view would show the imprint of the early Universe in painstaking detail for the first time. If the standard model of cosmology, the Lambda CDM, were correct, then Planck would confirm it to unprecedented levels of accuracy. If they were wrong, Planck would open new fields in cosmology and fundamental Physics. When the image was revealed in 2013, the data had confirmed the model. The fit to our expectations was too good to draw any other conclusion: Planck had showed us an ‘almost perfect universe’. “Almost perfect” because a few anomalies remained and these would be one of focuses of future research in CMB. In August 2018, five years later, the Planck Consortium has made their final data release in Temperature and Polarization, known as “The Planck Legacy”, with the best cleaning from systematics and foregrounds (galactic and sources) and the message remains the same and strengthened. This is the most important legacy of Planck. During the Lecture I will address the following points: - The stability of main scientific results across the 2013, 2015 and intermediate product public deliveries, confirmed by the 2018 legacy data release. - 2018: Main Legacy results and improvements in the understanding and correction of systematics in Polarization. - Open issues: Small remaining uncertainties of systematics in polarization Some 2.0/2.5 sigma “anomalie