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What can we learn about the Universe from its baby picture?

February 6, 2025
19:00 EST

Room 102, McLennan Physical Laboratories, 255 Huron Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Credit: Planck Collaboration (2018)

Talk Abstract

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is our first snapshot of the universe from its young age of about 380,000 years old. Since its discovery in 1964, many telescopes have been deployed to measure the CMB in order to determine exactly what happened in the earliest moments of the universe. In this talk, we will discuss how telescopes measure the CMB, what information we can learn from this data, and how we determine if different models of the universe are consistent with our data. In particular, we will discuss how cosmological inflation, a time period where the universe underwent exponential expansion in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, affects the signal we measure in the CMB.

About the Speaker

About the Speaker

Speaker

Simran Nerval (she/her)

Simran Nerval (she/her) is a PhD candidate at The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and The David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. She studies a time period known as inflation, the exponential expansion of the universe within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. She uses a combination of theory, computer simulations, and data analysis to determine constraints on inflationary models. Simran received her Honours Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Toronto and her Master of Science in Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology from Queen’s University. Alongside her research, she works on various outreach and EDI initiatives including coding and astronomy camps for high school students with Coding the Cosmos in order to promote enthusiasm for science in youth and advocate for diversity. In her free time, she is an aspiring baker, baking everything from loaves of bread to decorated cakes!