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Recent results from BOOMERANG-98 and MAXIMA-1, taken together with COBE DMR, provide consistent and high signal-to-noise measurements of the cosmic microwave background power spectrum at spherical harmonic multipole bands over 2

We describe the design, development and test of a self-contained 3 He fridge, aimed to cool at ≲0.3 K a bolometric detection system with a hold time of two weeks. The system is robust and suitable for operation on a long-duration stratospheric balloon payload. A physical model of the fridge has been developed, which describes the measured hold time, limiting temperature and load curve of the fridge. The system has been flight tested successfully during two balloon flights of the BOOMERanG payload in summer 1997.

ESO introduced a User Portal for its scientific services in November 2007. Registered users have a central entry point for the Observatory's offerings, the extent of which depends on the users' roles - see [1]. The project faced and overcame a number of challenging hurdles between inception and deployment, and ESO learned a number of useful lessons along the way. The most significant challenges were not only technical in nature; organization and coordination issues took a significant toll as well. We also indicate the project's roadmap for the future.

We describe here an iterative method for jointly estimating the noise power spectrum from a CMB experiment's time-ordered data, together with the maximum-likelihood map. We test the robustness of this method on simulated Boomerang datasets with realistic noise.

Turning the ESA Hubble Space Telescope Archive along with ESO Archive Facility into a VO-compliant data centre is a complex process: new technologies and standards have to be adopted and a more detailed description (metadata) of the data holdings is required. While Astrovirtel helped us understanding and exploring ways to achieve the latter, the current world-wide effort of developing VO-compliant software can allow us to provide with limited in-house effort the aforementioned metadata through a modern VO interface. This technology has proved to be mature enough to be used in the presented example, where HST-ACS & HST-WFPC2 associations (a ST-ECF, CADC, STScI project) metadata and field of view are visualised with Aladin. This is not only a useful application for the end user but also a first step of the on-going effort toward a VO-compliant Archive. In spite of its novelty and being still under development, VO technology is mature to cope with real life scenarios, allowing the implementation of powerful concepts like the metadata tree presented in our example.

The BOOMERANG experiment provided the first high resolution map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. In this paper we summarize the main parts of the instrument, including bolometers, cryogenics, optics and pointing system. We show then how the instrument is designed to be robust to systematic effects.

The anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation contains information about the contents and history of the universe. We report new limits on cosmological parameters derived from the angular power spectrum measured in the first Antarctic flight of the Boomerang experiment. Within the framework of models with adiabatic perturbations, and using only weakly restrictive prior probabilities on the age of the universe and the Hubble expansion parameter h, we find that the curvature is consistent with flat and that the primordial fluctuation spectrum is consistent with scale invariant, in agreement with the basic inflation paradigm. We find that the data prefer a baryon density Ωbh2 above, though similar to, the estimates from light element abundances and big bang nucleosynthesis. When combined with large scale structure observations, the Boomerang data provide clear detections of both dark matter and dark energy contributions to the total energy density Ωtot, independent of data from high-redshift supernovae.

The CMB is the fundamental tool to study the properties of the early universe and of the universe at large scales. In the framework of the Hot Big Bang model, when we look to the CMB we look back in time to the end of the plasma era, at a redshift ~ 1000, when the universe was ~ 50000 times younger, ~ 1000 times hotter and ~ 10^9 times denser than today. The image of the CMB can be used to study the physical processes there, to infer what happened before, and also to study the background geometry of our Universe.

BOOMERanG has recently resolved structures on the last scattering surface at redshift ˜ 1100 with high signal to noise ratio. We review the technical advances which made this possible, and we focus on the current results for maps and power spectra, with special attention to the determination of the total mass-energy density in the Universe and of other cosmological parameters.

We report the first results from the BOOMERanG experiment, which mapped at 90, 150, 240 and 410 GHz a wide (3%) region of the microwave sky with minimal local contamination. From the data of the best 150 GHz detector we find evidence for a well defined peak in the power spectrum of temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, localized at $\ell = 197 \pm 6$, with an amplitude of $(68 \pm 8) \mu K_{CMB}$. The location, width and amplitude of the peak is suggestive of acoustic oscillations in the primeval plasma. In the framework of inflationary adiabatic cosmological models the measured spectrum allows a Bayesian estimate of the curvature of the Universe and of other cosmological parameters. With reasonable priors we find $\Omega = (1.07 \pm 0.06)$ and $n_s = (1.00 \pm 0.08)$ (68%C.L.) in excellent agreement with the expectations from the simplest inflationary theories. We also discuss the limits on the density of baryons, of cold dark matter and on the cosmological constant., Comment: Proc. of the CAPP2000 conference, Verbier, 17-28 July 2000

The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73K Cosmic Microwave Background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the microwave background in the form of small anisotropies in its temperature. These anisotropies contain information about basic cosmological parameters, particularly the total energy density and curvature of the universe. Here we report the first images of resolved structure in the microwave background anisotropies over a significant part of the sky. Maps at four frequencies clearly distinguish the microwave background from foreground emission. We compute the angular power spectrum of the microwave background, and find a peak at Legendre multipole $\ell_{peak}=(197 \pm 6)$, with an amplitude $DT_{200}=(69 \pm 8)\mu K$. This is consistent with that expected for cold dark matter models in a flat (euclidean) Universe, as favoured by standard inflationary scenarios.