Speaker: Thomas Essinger-Hileman (NASA Goddard) – Title: Science with CLASS and Future CMB Space Missions
April 16 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Research Progress Meeting
Date: April 16, 2026
Time: 4:00- 5:00 pm
Location: Sessler Conference Room- 50A-5132 [In-Person and HYBRID]
Speaker: Thomas Essinger-Hileman (NASA Goddard)
Title: Science with CLASS and Future CMB Space Missions
Abstract: The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a unique probe of the state of the early universe and its evolution since recombination approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang. CMB observations have been critical in building a concordance model of cosmology consisting of a spatially flat universe dominated by dark matter and dark energy. Current CMB projects from the ground and balloons continue to address fundamental questions in astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics: Did cosmic inflation create our Universe? What is the nature of dark energy? When and how did the first stars reionize the universe? and What is the mass of the neutrinos? I will highlight ongoing work to constrain reionization and the mass of neutrinos with the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), which observes more than 65% of the sky from the Atacama Desert of Chile, as well as need for future CMB space missions like LiteBIRD and a NASA CMB Probe satellite to make the ultimate measurements of the CMB at large angular scales.
https://lbnl.zoom.us/j/98854322464?pwd=K2tKUm1VZjRlV1J5RHE3cXdHQzRxdz09
Meeting ID: 988 5432 2464
Passcode: 142239