From March to June 2024, graduate student Arsalan Adil traversed across the northern region of his home country of Pakistan on an adventure that was peppered with science outreach efforts.

In a new study, UC Davis researchers and their colleagues in the South Pole Telescope (SPT) collaboration used observational data of this first light — collected from the SPT located at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica — to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the Lambda-cold dark matter model, the standard cosmological model of the Big Bang.