National Academies Press: OpenBook

Cosmology: A Research Briefing (1995)

Chapter: Front Matter

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×

Cosmology: A Research Briefing

Panel on Cosmology

Board on Physics and Astronomy

Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications

National Research Council

National Academy Press
Washington, D.C.
1995

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×

NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approvedby the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose membersare drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences,the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.The members of the panel responsible for the report were chosen fortheir special competences and with regard for appropriate balance.

This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors accordingto procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting ofmembers of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academyof Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit, self-perpetuatingsociety of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineeringresearch, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technologyand to their use for the general welfare. Upon the authority of thecharter granted to it by Congress in 1863, the Academy has a mandatethat requires it to advise the federal government on scientific andtechnical matters. Dr. Bruce Alberts is president of the NationalAcademy of Sciences.

The National Academy of Engineering was established in 1964, underthe charter of the National Academy of Sciences, as a parallel organizationof outstanding engineers. It is autonomous in its administrationand in the selection of its members, sharing with the National Academyof Sciences the responsibility for advising the federal government.The National Academy of Engineering also sponsors engineering programsaimed at meeting national needs, encourages education and research,and recognizes the superior achievements of engineers. Dr. HaroldLiebowitz is president of the National Academy of Engineering.

The Institute of Medicine was established in 1970 by the NationalAcademy of Sciences to secure the services of eminent members ofappropriate professions in the examination of policy matters pertainingto the health of the public. The Institute acts under the responsibilitygiven to the National Academy of Sciences by its congressional charterto be an advisor to the federal government and, upon its own initiative,to identify issues of medical care, research, and education. Dr.Kenneth I. Shine is president of the Institute of Medicine.

The National Research Council was established by the National Academyof Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science andtechnology with the Academy's purposes of furthering knowledge andadvising the federal government. Functioning in accordance with generalpolicies determined by the Academy, the Council has become the principaloperating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and theNational Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government,the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The Councilis administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine.Dr. Bruce Alberts and Dr. Harold Liebowitz are chairman and vicechairman, respectively, of the National Research Council.

This project was supported by the National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration (NASA) under Grant No. NAGW-3304.

Front Cover: The anisotropy of the temperature of the cosmic microwave backgroundradiation, as mapped by the Differential Microwave Radiometer onNASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. Red shades representhotter fluctuations, and blue and black shades represent cooler fluctuations.(Courtesy of the COBE team and NASA.)

Back Cover: Looking back in time with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The HST's Wide-Field Planetary Camera (WFPC2) captured this image of galaxiesas they were billions of years ago. Many objects are irregular andill-formed compared to nearby galaxies, showing the evolution offorms of galaxies between the distant past and times closer to thepresent. The size of the image is 75 arc seconds, and the total exposuretime is 15 hours. (Courtesy of Edward Groth, Jerome Kristian, andmembers of the WFPC2 team.)

Additional copies of this report are available from:

Board on Physics and Astronomy

HA 562

National Research Council

2101 Constitution Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20418

Copyright 1995 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×

PANEL ON COSMOLOGY

MARC DAVIS,

University of California at Berkeley,

Chair

BLAS CABRERA,

Stanford University

SANDRA M. FABER,

University of California, Santa Cruz

MARGARET GELLER,

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

JACQUELINE N. HEWITT,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

RICHARD KRON,

Yerkes Observatory, University of Chicago

PHILIP M. LUBIN,

University of California, Santa Barbara

STEPHAN S. MEYER,

University of Chicago

JEREMIAH P. OSTRIKER,

Princeton University Observatory

DAVID N. SCHRAMM,

University of Chicago

DAVID WILKINSON,

Princeton University

DONALD C. SHAPERO, Director

ROBERT L. RIEMER, Senior Program Officer

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×

BOARD ON PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

DAVID N. SCHRAMM,

University of Chicago,

Chair

ROBERT C. DYNES,

University of California, San Diego,

Vice Chair

LLOYD ARMSTRONG, JR.,

University of Southern California

DAVID H. AUSTON,

Rice University

DAVID E. BALDWIN,

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

PRAVEEN CHAUDHARI,

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

FRANK DRAKE,

University of California, Santa Cruz

HANS FRAUENFELDER,

Los Alamos National Laboratory

JEROME I. FRIEDMAN,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MARGARET GELLER,

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

MARTHA P. HAYNES,

Cornell University

WILLIAM KLEMPERER,

Harvard University

ALBERT NARATH,

Sandia National Laboratories

JOSEPH M. PROUD,

GTE Corporation (retired)

ROBERT C. RICHARDSON,

Cornell University

JOHANNA STACHEL,

State University of New York at Stony Brook

DAVID WILKINSON,

Princeton University

SIDNEY WOLFF,

National Optical Astronomy Observatories

DONALD C. SHAPERO, Director

ROBERT L. RIEMER, Associate Director

DANIEL F. MORGAN, Program Officer

NATASHA A. CASEY, Program Assistant

STEPHANIE Y. SMITH, Project Assistant

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×

COMMISSION ON PHYSICAL SCIENCES, MATHEMATICS, AND APPLICATIONS

RICHARD N. ZARE,

Stanford University,

Chair

RICHARD S. NICHOLSON,

American Association for the Advancement of Science,

Vice Chair

STEPHEN L. ADLER,

Institute for Advanced Study

SYLVIA T. CEYER,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

SUSAN L. GRAHAM,

University of California, Berkeley

ROBERT J. HERMANN,

United Technologies Corporation

RHONDA J. HUGHES,

Bryn Mawr College

SHIRLEY A. JACKSON,

Rutgers University

KENNETH I. KELLERMANN,

National Radio Astronomy Observatory

HANS MARK,

University of Texas at Austin

THOMAS A. PRINCE,

California Institute of Technology

JEROME SACKS,

National Institute of Statistical Sciences

L.E. SCRIVEN,

University of Minnesota

LEON T. SILVER,

California Institute of Technology

CHARLES P. SLICHTER,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ALVIN W. TRIVELPIECE,

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

SHMUEL WINOGRAD,

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

CHARLES A. ZRAKET, MITRE Corporation (retired)

NORMAN METZGER, Executive Director

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
This page in the original is blank.
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×

Preface

The Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) is reassessing the areasof physics that were examined by the Physics Survey Committee inits report, Physics Through the 1990s (National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1986). One of the eightvolumes of the report, Gravitation, Cosmology, and Cosmic-Ray Physics, was the subject of a National Research Council program initiationmeeting that I chaired in 1992. At that meeting, the need for reassessmentsin the areas of cosmology, neutrino astrophysics, and cosmic-rayphysics was identified.

The Panel on Cosmology, along with the Committee on Cosmic-Ray Physicsand the Panel on Neutrino Astrophysics, is part of this updatingeffort. Because of the connection to astrophysics and astronomy,the BPA has coordinated with the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics(CAA) in the conduct of this study. The panel is chaired by MarcDavis, who also chairs the CAA.

The research briefing format is intended to provide advice to programmanagers and policy makers on the opportunities for scientific advancesin a frontier field. The field of cosmology is an exciting frontierwhere astronomy, nuclear physics, and particle physics meet, andwhere we may be able to discover how the universe came to be as itis today.

David Schramm

Chair

Board on Physics and Astronomy

Page viii Cite
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
This page in the original is blank.
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×

Contents

 I.

 

OVERVIEW

 

1

   

 What Is Cosmology?

 

1

   

 What's All the Excitement About?

 

1

   

 The Cosmic Questions

 

3

   

 Why Do Research in Cosmology?

 

9

   

 Why Now?

 

10

   

 Summary

 

11

 II.

 

THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND RADIATION

 

12

   

 What Is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation?

 

12

   

 What Do We Learn by Measuring the Properties of the CMBR?

 

12

   

 The spectrum

 

12

   

 Why are “bumps” in the CMBR so important?

 

13

   

 Measurements of Anisotropy

 

14

   

 Large-scale anisotropy

 

14

   

 Medium-scale anisotropy

 

14

   

 Small-scale anisotropy

 

15

 III.

 

THE LARGE-SCALE STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE

 

17

   

 Galaxy Maps and Large-Scale Structure

 

17

   

 What is large-scale structure, and why is it important?

 

17

   

 Mapping the large-scale structure

 

17

   

 The importance of uniform galaxy surveys

 

17

   

 Theory of large-scale structure

 

18

   

 Cosmic Velocity Flows

 

19

   

 What are cosmic flows, and why are they important?

 

19

   

 Measuring cosmic flows

 

20

   

 Summary and Prospects for Large-Scale Structure

 

21

 IV.

 

THE DISTANT UNIVERSE

 

22

   

 Measuring the Cosmological Parameters

 

22

   

 The Hubble constant, H0

 

22

   

 The deceleration parameter, q0

 

23

   

 The density parameter, Ω

 

24

   

 Deep Imaging of Galaxies

 

24

   

 Evolution of Large-Scale Structure Back in Time

 

25

   

 Supernovae, Quasars, and Absorption Line Systems: Probes for Cosmology

 

25

   

 Gravitational Lenses

 

27

   

 What are gravitational lenses, and why are they important?

 

27

   

 Measuring cosmological parameters with gravitational lenses

 

28

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R1
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R2
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R3
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R4
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R5
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R6
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R7
Page viii Cite
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R8
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R9
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 1995. Cosmology: A Research Briefing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9293.
×
Page R10
Next: I. OVERVIEW »
Cosmology: A Research Briefing Get This Book
×
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF
  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!