2025-11-21

Title:  Histories of Cosmic Dust, Gas, Stars, and Structure Formation with Full CMB Secondary Tomography

Speaker: Yi-Kuan Chiang

Date: Nov 21 at 14:30
 
Location: R521, Institute of Astronomy
 
Abstract:
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) data are maximally projected along the line of sight, with intricate secondary anisotropies that each reveal a distinct chapter of cosmic evolution. In a series of six papers and ongoing, we embark on a deeply data-intensive, cross-correlation redshift tomography of CMB secondaries, analyzing over two billion sky pixels across over twenty diffuse maps (e.g., Planck, IRAS, Herschel) together with large-scale structure (LSS) tracers from galaxy surveys with available spectroscopic redshifts. This unified campaign unlocks a panoramic view of cosmic baryons across space and time. Key results include: (1) a thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect measurement of the cosmic thermal energy history, Ωth, in hot gas and its implications for structure growth powered by gravitational energy, Ωgrav; (2) the most precise cosmic star-formation history to date, revealedby 11-band cosmic infrared background (CIB) tomography with fully constrained SEDs over 90% of cosmic time; (3) the cosmic dust evolution, Ωdust, across all host environments; (4) revealing CIB leakage in ten Galactic dust maps, introducing a new component separation algorithm fully constrained by field-level 3D LSS information, producing the clean, all purposed “CSFD” dust map; and, in the latest installment of the series, (5) the first tomographic detection of CO and [CII] line-intensity backgrounds, tracing the molecular-gas density, ΩH2, and the cosmic history of cooling budget. Together, these results offer a unified, observationally driven view of the cosmic baryon cycle across 12 Gyr of evolution.