coffee/tea and cookies will be served in the lounge of Steinbach Hall (52 Hillhouse) starting at 2 PM.
In this talk I will describe efforts to measure the Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB). This is the integrated extragalactic light of stars (galaxies) and other sources (AGN?) as seen in direct and reprocessed light at IR wavelengths, across the entire history of the universe. Detection of the CIB is not so much limited by the technology of the measurements as it is by the ability to recognize and remove the brighter foreground contributions from our own Galaxy and Solar System. The emphasis in this talk is on the foregrounds. To really measure the CIB we need to be sure we understand all the systematic errors of the measurements and the foreground subtraction. These efforts to understand foregrounds have led to looking at the COBE/DIRBE data in new ways (movies, not images), and the unexpected discovery of cometary and asteroidal dust trails (leading to meteor showers) – 25 years after the data were collected.