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Session 116 - Large Scale Structure.
Oral session, Thursday, January 16
Piers 4/5,
The COBE FIRAS experiment has shown that the spectrum of the nearly isotropic CMB has a blackbody form to the limits of its sensitivity, while the COBE DMR experiment has measured anisotropy in the CMB temperature with an rms amplitude of one part in 10^5 on angular scales greater than 7 degrees. The anisotropy detected by DMR is widely interpreted as being cosmological in origin. The primary evidence for this comes from spectral analyses of the DMR data at three independent frequencies. The FIRAS data are also sensitive enough to observe anisotropy in the CMB and provide much broader frequency coverage than the DMR. We have performed a joint analysis of the FIRAS and DMR data and find the anisotropy data to be consistent. These results provide compelling support for the interpretation that the signal seen by DMR is, in fact, cosmological in origin.
