Taking the Universe’s Temperature with Spectral Distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Taking the Universe’s Temperature with Spectral Distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) energy spectrum is a near-perfect blackbody. The standard model of cosmology predicts small spectral distortions to this form, but no such distortion of the sky-averaged CMB spectrum has yet been measured. We calculate the largest expected distortion, which arises from the inverse Compton scattering of …