The Cosmic microwave background: State of the art

Abstract We review the current status of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, including a brief discussion of some basic theoretical aspects as well as a summary of anisotropy detections and CMB experiments. We focus on the description of some relevant characteristics of the microwave foregrounds, on the discussion of the different estimators proposed in the literature to detect non-Gaussianity and on outlining the bases of different reconstruction methods that have been applied to the CMB.