Knowledge Bank

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the remnant radiation from the early universe. Since it’s an almost ideal black body, physicists measure the temperature of this radiation to map the CMB. To usefully visualize this data from the surface of the celestial sphere, it is important to project it onto a 2-D plane, and there are multiple ways to do this. We simulate the CMB temperature as a normal distribution and recreate three common projections (Equirectangular, Mercator and Mollweide) to understand useful properties of each.