NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite mission, the COBE, laid the foundations for modern cosmology by measuring the spectrum and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation and discovering the cosmic infrared background radiation. I describe the history of the COBE project, its scientific context, the people who built it, and the scientific results. The COBE observed the unive...

The results from the COBE * satellite are in close quantitative agreement with the predictions of the standard hot Big Bang model, suggesting that the Universe was once hot, dense and isothermal, giving a background radiation spectrum that is close to a perfect blackbody. The need to preserve this blackbody spectrum to match the spectrum observed by the FIRAS instrument on COBE places strong li...

The author contends that sex differentials in childhood mortality in Pakistan are a likely outcome of son preference behavior by parents. Consideration is given to the historical improvement in the female disadvantage in mortality, the neglect of female children, gender and class factors, and son preference and high fertility. Data are from the 1981 Pakistan census and other official surveys....

Voyage 2050 White Paper highlighting the unique science opportunities using spectral distortions of cosmic microwave background (CMB). CMB probe many processes throughout history Universe. Precision spectroscopy, possible with existing technology, would provide key tests for expected within cosmological standard model and open an enormous discovery space to new physics. This offers scientific f...

Kaiping Zhang, Yanfang Ma, Jinlin Wu, Qianling Shi, Leandro Cardoso Barchi, Marco Scarci, Rene Horsleben Petersen, Calvin S. H. Ng, Steven Hochwald, Ryuichi Waseda, Fabio Davoli, Robert Fruscio, Giovanni Battista Levi Sandri, Michel Gonzalez, Benjamin Wei, Guillaume Piessen, Jianfei Shen, Xianzhuo Panpan Jiao, Yulong He, Nuria M. Novoa, Benedetta Bedetti, Sebastien Gilbert, Alan D. L. Sihoe, Al...

We have deduced the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature in the Coma cluster (Abell 1656, z = 0.0231), and in Abell 2163 (z = 0.203) from spectral measurements of the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect over four passbands at radio and microwave frequencies. The resulting temperatures at these redshifts are TComa = 2.750 +0.043 −0.032 K and TA2163 = 3.335 +0.065 −0.066 K, respectively. Thes...

Using recent experimental limits on distortions from COBE FIRAS, and the large lever-arm spanning the damping of sub-Jeans scale uctuations to the scale of the COBE DMR uctuations, we set a constraint on the slope of the primordial power spectrum n. It is possible to analytically calculate the contribution over the full range of scales and redshifts, correctly taking into account uctuation grow...

We test the assumption of entropy conservation between Big Bang nucleosynthesis and recombination by considering a massive particle that decays into mixture photons other relativistic species. employ Planck temperature polarization anisotropies, COBE/FIRAS spectral distortion bounds, observed primordial deuterium abundance to constrain these decay scenarios. If $56\%$ $71\%$ decaying particle's...

We construct an analytically solvable simplified model that captures the essential features for primordial black hole (PBH) production in most models of single-field inflation. The construction makes use Wands duality between constant-roll (or slow-roll) and preceding ultra-slow-roll phases can be realized by a simple inflaton potential two joined parabolas. Within this framework, it is possibl...