Probing cosmology with diffuse microwave and radio observations

宇宙学研究的是物质宇宙和我们在其中的位置。正在解决的问题意义深远：宇宙有多大？它是如何开始的？它将如何结束？它是有限的还是无限的？值得注意的是，我们生活在一个这些问题开始得到解答的时代。仅仅十年前，我们对宇宙的年龄和命运只有初步的了解。今天，由于一系列高科技仪器的精确观测，我们知道宇宙的年龄超过1%:137.5±1.1亿年。我们知道宇宙的主要成分是暗物质（23%）和暗能量（73%）。普通原子物质只占宇宙的4%。据我们所知，宇宙是无限的（或者至少是非常大的），它将永远膨胀下去，而且速度越来越快。这一进展之所以成为可能，是因为使用特殊用途仪器进行了广泛的观测。可以说，美国宇航局的威尔金森微波各向异性探测器（WMAP）是对过去十年的进步负有最大责任的实验，使WMAP成为过去几年所有科学中被引用次数最多的实验。有了这个“发现”计划，作为一名新的加拿大教员，我正在寻求资金，以继续开展观测宇宙学方面的积极研究项目。我计划领导和/或参与以下实验：

Cosmology is the study of the physical universe and our place in it. The questions being addressed are profound: How old is the universe? How did it begin? How will it end? Is it finite or infinite? Remarkably, we live in a time when these questions are starting to be answered. A mere decade ago we had only rudimentary knowledge of the age and fate of our universe. Today, thanks to precise observations from an array of high-technology instrumentation, we know the age of the universe to better than 1%: 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years. We know the contents of the universe are dominated by dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Ordinary atomic matter makes up only 4% of the universe. To the best of our knowledge, the universe is infinite (or at least very large) and it will continue expanding forever, indeed at an ever-faster rate. This progress has been made possible by a wide range of observations with special purpose instrumentation. Arguably, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is the experiment that has been most responsible for the advances of the past decade, making WMAP the most-cited experiment in all of science in the past few years. With this Discovery proposal, and as a new Canadian faculty member, I seek funds to continue a vigorous research program in observational cosmology. I plan to lead and/or contribute to the following experiments: