The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r) = 0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensorto-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources a .

We have discovered rapid quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in RXTE/PCA measurements of the pulsating tail of the 2004 December 27 giant flare of SGR 1806Ϫ20. QPOs at ∼92.5 Hz are detected in a 50 s interval starting 170 s after the onset of the giant flare. These QPOs appear to be associated with increased emission by a relatively hard unpulsed component and are seen only over phases of the 7.56 s spin period pulsations away from the main peak. QPOs at ∼18 and ∼30 Hz are also detected ∼200-300 s after the onset of the giant flare. This is the first time that QPOs are unambiguously detected in the flux of a soft gamma-ray repeater or any other magnetar candidate. We interpret the highest QPOs in terms of the coupling of toroidal seismic modes with Alfvén waves propagating along magnetospheric field lines. The lowest frequency QPO might instead provide indirect evidence on the strength of the internal magnetic field of the magnetar.

Space Science Reviews, 134, pp. 93-118, http://dx.doi.org./10.1007/s11214-008-9311-xInternational audienc

We present the results of a strong-lensing analysis of a complete sample of 12 very luminous X-ray clusters at z > 0.5 using HST/ACS images. Our modelling technique has uncovered some of the largest known critical curves outlined by many accurately predicted sets of multiple images. The distribution of Einstein radii has a median value of 28 arcsec (for a source redshift of z s ∼ 2), twice as large as other lower z samples, and extends to 55 arcsec for MACS J0717.5+3745, with an impressive enclosed Einstein mass of 7.4 × 10 14 M . We find that nine clusters cover a very large area (>2.5 arcmin 2 ) of high magnification (μ > 10×) for a source redshift of z s ∼ 8, providing primary targets for accessing the first stars and galaxies. We compare our results with theoretical predictions of the standard cold dark matter ( CDM) model which we show systematically fall short of our measured Einstein radii by a factor of 1.4, after accounting for the effect of lensing projection. Nevertheless, a revised analysis, once arc redshifts become available, and similar analyses of larger samples, is needed in order to establish more precisely the level of discrepancy with CDM predictions.