Meeting Information

ARCADE Detection of an Extragalactic Radio Background

January 20, 2010
American Center for Physics
College Park, MD

Date: January 20, 2010

Speaker: Dr. Alan Kogut, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Topic: ARCADE Detection of an Extragalactic Radio Background

Time and Location: Talk starts at 1:00 pm with Q&A to follow. It will be held in one of the first floor conference rooms at the American Center for Physics, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD. This is located off River Road, between Kenilworth Ave. and Paint Branch Parkway.

Abstract:  Sometimes when we look for one thing we stumble on something else. The Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE) was designed to measure the blackbody spectrum of the cosmic microwave background to search for spectral distortions related to the formation of the first stars in the early universe. Instead, the July 2006 flight found evidence for an extragalactic radio background with amplitude six times brighter than the expected contribution from faint radio sources. I will discuss the ARCADE detection and its implications for our understanding of Galactic and extragalactic radio emission.

Biography:  Dr. Alan Kogut received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. He came to Goddard Space Flight Center in 1989 to work on the Cosmic Background Explorer mission and has remained there ever since. He has worked on a number of missions to measure the spectrum, anisotropy, and polarization of the cosmic microwave background and diffuse radio foregrounds.