Microwave anisotropies in the light of the data from the COBE satellite

The recent measurement of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite and the recent South Pole experiment offer an excellent opportunity to probe cosmological theories. We test a class of theories in which the Universe today is flat and matter dominated, and primordial perturbations are adiabatic parametrized by an idex n. In this class of theories the predicted signal in the South Pole experiment depends on n, the Hubble constant, and the baryon density. For n=1 a large region of this parameter space is ruled out, but there is still a window open which satisfies constraints from COBE, measurements of the age of the Universe, the South Pole experiment, and big bang nucleosynthesis. We also explore the effect of varying n