Astronomy Tea Talk

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter telescope designed to survey the millimeter-wave sky, taking advantage of the exceptional observing conditions at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The telescope and its ground-breaking 960-element bolometric camera were successfully installed at the South Pole in 2007. Since then, SPT has embarked upon a large, three-frequency survey covering 6% of the entire sky. I will report on the multi-frequency power spectrum results for this survey, including a detection of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) power and improved upper limits on the kinetic SZ power. I will discuss how we can use the kinetic SZ power and CMB polarization data to determine when the epoch of reionization began, when it ended and how long it lasted. I will also present predicted reionization constraints from CCAT.