The History of Cosine Microwave Background

The next big instrument to measure the details of the cosine microwave background was called WMap, the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe. It could see variations in the sky down to a small fraction of a degree and it really brought in like the age of precision cosmology. Starting around 2007, some other telescopes started to study thecosine microwave background from the ground. These had much higher resolution than what you could do from space. They were complementary to the satellite-based measurements. Plonk tells us the density of protons and neutrons in the universe to 0.6% precision. So these are better than 1%. And it also tells us the amount of dark matter in