Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Joint Astrophysics Seminar

Cosmology from the Stratosphere

Barth Netterfield

University of Toronto

Balloon borne telescopes can achieve much of the promise of a sattelite borne experiment, at a fraction of the cost, while providing important tests for upcoming sattelite missions. I will discuss three such balloon borne instruments: BOOMERANG, BLAST, and Spider. BOOMERANG (past) and Spider (future) measure the cosmic microwave background, while BLAST is a sub-mm telescope looking at star formation.