Probing Cosmology with Diffuse Background Radiation Observations

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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? Just over a 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%: 13.77 billion years. We know the contents of the universe are dominated by dark matter (24%) and dark energy (71%). Ordinary atomic matter makes up only 4.6% 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. The full–sky maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation produced by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and ESA's Planck Surveyor Mission played a pivotal role in these advances. As a founding member of the WMAP team I have spent most of my career studying the CMB. I propose to continue these very productive studies