A couple of the students in Ted Bunn’s research group published papers recently on their research in cosmology. You can find more details about their work in some posts on Ted’s blog.
Junior Austin Bourdon and Bunn published a paper analyzing some puzzling results from the WMAP satellite. WMAP is a NASA-funded orbiting telescope that has mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation in great detail.
This radiation is the oldest light in the Universe and tells us a lot about conditions shortly after the Big Bang. Some features of these maps appear inconsistent with the best theoretical models. Austin and Bunn tried to search for alternative explanations. The paper was accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review D. Bunn wrote a bit more about it in this blog post, or if you really want the details you can read the paper. (Use the link at the upper right to download the PDF if you want the whole thing.)
Senior Brent Follin worked with Bunn and a former graduate student at the University of Wisconsin 
on another project having to do with the microwave background radiation. The cosmology group at UR is working with researchers at several other universities on a radically new design for a telescope to map the microwave background radiation. This telescope will be an interferometer, which really means a set of many very simple telescopes, combined with a mechanism to “mix” the light from all of them together. It’s a bit tricky to do this mixing in such a way that it’s possible to extract all of the useful information at the end. The three researchers managed to solve an important part of this problem and published the result in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Bunn blogged a bit about this work when we first submitted it. You can read the article if you want to.
