Studying the beginning of the universe from the bottom of the world

For over 30 years, scientists have been going to the bottom of the Earth--the geographic South Pole--to make observations of the relic heat from the Big Bang, also called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this 60-minute public lecture, held on February 28, 2020, Dr. Brad Benson gives a brief history of these measurements and talks about the challenges associated with building CMB experiments and instruments at one of the coldest, most remote places on Earth. He explains how these measurements are revolutionizing our understanding of the origins, content, and evolution of the universe, including the surprising discovery that nearly 95% of the universe is comprised of two mysterious components: dark matter and dark energy. Dr. Benson discusses new measurements designed to understand the physics within the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang and how these instruments have recently been used to take the first direct image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, as part of the Event Horizon Telescope project.

Dr. Benson is an experimental cosmologist who studies the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the very early universe that was emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang. His research frequently takes him to the South Pole, where he and his colleagues work on the South Pole Telescope to study the cosmic microwave background:    • South Pole Telescope Camera   They are building instruments designed to answer some of the biggest questions in cosmology: What physics was responsible for the Big Bang? What is the universe made of? What is dark energy? Dr. Benson is an associate scientist at Fermilab, a senior member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago,

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