Observations of the sky at millimeter wavelengths are of critical importance to modern cosmology. Measurements of the primary cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies, its secondary anisotropies, and foreground objects all contribute to our understanding the universe. As the oldest light in the universe, the CMB contains imprints from much of...
State-of-the-art 19th century spectroscopy led to the discovery of quantum mechanics, and 20th century spectroscopy led to the confirmation of quantum electrodynamics. State-of-the-art 21st century astrophysical spectrographs, especially ANDES at ESO's ELT, have another opportunity to play a key role in the search for, and characterization of, the ...
One of the great successes of modern cosmology is the percent-level concordance between theory and observations of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at z ≳ 1.7. Yet, the Lyα forest at z
This dissertation contains works spanning several topics in cosmology and astrophysics. They are tied together by themes of dark matter and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), but with a highly varied methodology spanning theory, data analysis, and hardware. Chapter 2 introduces a novel production mechanism for sterile neutrino dark matter invol...
Astronomy uses a wide range of representational formats to produce and mediate disciplinary knowledge, ranging from written language and text to mathematics, images and video simulations. The use of these representations has been a subject of investigation in Astronomy Education Research (AER), with a major focus on different kinds of visual repres...
We investigate the late-time cosmological dynamics in a simple case of explicit spacetime-symmetry breaking. By expanding in a small symmetry-breaking coefficient we are able to write the Friedmann equations as $\Lambda$CDM + dynamical dark energy, which we show contains logarithmic dependence of the scale factor. We find that the dark energy equat...
Published in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the brightest objects in the Universe and, hence, can be observed up to a very high redshift. Properly calibrated empirical correlations between intensity and spectral correlations of GRBs can be used to estimate the cosmological parameters. However, the possibility of the evolution of GRBs with redshift is a long-...
What does it mean for an organization “to exist”? Building upon the philosophical notion of ontologies as theories of existence, I outline a theory of organizational ontology supported by the premise that organizations contain implicit existential conventions that provide their members with an understanding of what their joint existence is. This st...
In this report, we present a novel Bayesian inference framework to reconstruct the three-dimensional initial conditions of cosmic structure formation from data. To achieve this goal, we leverage deep learning technologies to create a generative model of cosmic initial conditions paired with a fast machine learning surrogate model emulating the comp...
In this thesis, I describe several advances in modelling sources of systematic error associated with microwave telescope optics. Microwave telescopes observing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are a key tool in establishing and furthering the LCDM model of cosmology. In the near future, several telescopes will observe the polarized variations ...
