In an effort to probe the first few moments of time after the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, a consortium of researchers, including from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is planning a new observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
The $40 million initiative, known as the Simons Observatory, was announced today (May 9, 2016) and is being funded by major grants from the Simons Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation.