Past Event · public lecture

Viewing the Beginning of Time from the Most Remote Places on Earth

Presented by Zeeshan Ahmed

This reprised public lecture is available on YouTube. Watch the video before the live virtual Q&A on October 8.

Live Q&A with Zeeshan Ahmed 
Thursday, October 8, 2020 at 5:00-6:00 PM PDT.

 

Shortly after the birth of the universe, space was filled by a plasma that was literally red-hot. The light radiated by that plasma has traveled the vast emptiness of space for billions of years, with the expansion of the universe slowly stretching its waves until today it appears as microwave radiation. This is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), a glow still visible in the night sky. This glow is almost uniform, but small variations from point to point hold information about the conditions of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. 

After viewing the previous public lecture by SLAC staff scientist Zeeshan Ahmed on the CMB and its measurement, get an update on our plans for studying it with a new observatory called CMB-S4 from remote outposts near the South Pole and in Chile's Atacama Desert, during the live virtual Q&A.  

About Zeeshan Ahmed

Zeeshan Ahmed is an observational cosmologist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He received his PhD from Caltech in 2012 and held a postdoctoral position at Stanford University before being appointed a Panofsky Fellow at SLAC in 2015. During the term of the fellowship, he was a recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy’s prestigious Early Career Award.

Ahmed is now a staff scientist in SLAC’s Fundamental Physics Directorate. He is a member of several scientific teams imaging the CMB, designing even more powerful CMB cameras and developing ways to analyze their data in greater detail.

Past Event · public lecture

Viewing the Beginning of Time from the Most Remote Places on Earth

Presented by Zeeshan Ahmed

Public Lectures
Viewing the Beginning of Time from the Most Remote Places on Earth
Video
Date
Thursday, October 8, 2020
10:00–11:00 a.m. PDT
Play video on YouTube
Event poster