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Show 89 college of science The purpose of this project is to study the effects that our Galaxy's gravitational potential has on pho-tons from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The CMB is a bath of photons that are relics of the Universe at early times following the big bang. Photons in the bath propagate freely in space, but can be deflected from their original paths by the gravitational potential of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. To study this deflection of light we numerically simulated the path of light rays as they travel through a three-component model of the Galaxy, with a disk, a central bulge and an extended halo. Specifical-ly, we traced light rays, deflected by the Galaxy's gravity according to General Relativity, as they travel from an observer located at a position near the Sun. The results show that the amount of deflection increases as the light rays travel closer to the center of the galaxy; having a maximum deflection angle of 0.812037 arcseconds when traveling through a region 161.99 arcminutes away from galactic center creating a dipole pattern across the entire sky. With the use of spherical harmonics we are able to nor-malize this dipole pattern with the multipole moments of the CMB. Preliminary calculations show that the Galaxy may effect around 0.10 % of the quadrupole signal in the CMB PARTICLE DYNAMICS IN THE GALAXY'S GRAVITATIONAL POTENTIAL Benjamin Czaja (Benjamin Bromley) Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Utah UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Benjamin Czaja Benjamin Bromley |
