| Abstract: |
The Cosmic Microwave Background (or CMB), travelling since ~380,000 years after the Big Bang and crossing the whole observable Universe, is our primary source of information about how the Universe began, what it is made of, and how the cosmic structures that we see in the night sky today came to be. Over the last three decades multiple experimental campaigns have produced incredibly accurate measurements of the statistical properties of the CMB. These, paired up with the development of very accurate theory predictions, have allowed us to search for relic signatures of the physical processes that took place at the origin of the Universe and to determine precisely the abundances of the main Universe constituents which govern its evolution on large scales. Ultimately, this has led to the establishment of our standard model of cosmology. While the parameters of this model have been constrained to sub-percent precision, many fundamental questions about the Universe are still unanswered. In this talk I will give a snapshot of where we are in CMB cosmology, focussing on latest results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, and where we are heading next covering in particular the current leading programmes: the Simons Observatory experiment and the LiteBIRD satellite mission.
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