Bayesian analysis of the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background
2005
There is a wealth of cosmological information encoded in the spatial power spectrum of temperature anisotropies of the
cosmic microwave background. The sky, when viewed in the microwave, is very uniform, with a nearly perfect blackbody spectrum at 2.7 degrees. Very small amplitude brightness fluctuations (to one part in a million!!) trace small density perturbations in the early universe (roughly 300,000 years after the
Big Bang), which later grow through
gravitational instabilityto the large-scale structure seen in
redshift surveys... In this talk, I will discuss a Bayesian formulation of this problem; discuss a
Gibbs samplingapproach to numerically sampling from the Bayesian posterior, and the application of this approach to the first-year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. I will also comment on recent algorithmic developments for this approach to be tractable for the even more massive data set to be returned from the Planck satellite.
Keywords:
-
Correction
-
Source
-
Cite
-
Save
0
References
0
Citations
NaN
KQI