Professor Hans Kristian Kamfjord Eriksen from the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics has been awarded a new ERC Advanced Grant in this year's round for the Commander project. With funding of 2.5 million euros, he and the team will make the analysis of past, present, and future experiments of the cosmic microwave background radiation a thousand times faster.
Eriksen explains that the main goal of the project is to detect gravitational waves from the Big Bang, "space-time tremors" from the blast billions of years ago.
– To be able to detect them, we must model everything from our own solar system to the Milky Way, and to the entire universe, in the same model, explains Eriksen.
He compares the project to the unification of Norway:
– To achieve this, cosmology must be united into one field. This is the goal of Cosmoglobe, which started in 2019 with Ingunn Wehus at UiO as the project leader. In many ways, Ingunn Wehus is cosmology's answer to Harald Fairhair, he says with a twinkle in his eye.
The next generation of datasets will be much more sensitive.
– We are going to analyze future datasets in the new ERC project, which are much larger and more sensitive. The industrial revolution is now coming to cosmology: we are moving from one manual experiment to mass analysis, Eriksen adds.
Read the full interview in Norwegian on Titan.uio.no.