Planck All-sky
This morning, the European Space Agency and the Planck Consortium released the Planck satellite's first view of the entire sky. Behold.
A false-colour image of the whole sky as seen by Planck. The dust throughout the Galaxy is shown in blue. In the background, the mottled yellow features are relic radiation, called the Cosmic Microwave Background, which contains information about the earliest stages of the Universe. This image is a low-resolution version of the full data set. CREDIT: ESA, Planck LFI and HFI Consortia (2010)
Planck's main task is to study the echoes of the Big Bang; the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. It builds on the successes of COBE and WMAP that have gone before but covers a much bigger range of frequencies (30-857 GHz) and will ultimately be more sensitive. The range of frequencies is very important as it helps to disentangle the many sources of microwave radiation in the Universe that detract from the cosmological signal that Planck is trying to observe.
Today's image may vaguely resemble the Flying Spaghetti Monster* but actually shows our galaxy - the Milky Way - across the middle and you can see streamers of cold gas and dust in our local neighbourhood (local means within a few hundred light years) stretching above and below it. To get your bearings, there is an annotated version and you can also explore it in Chromoscope! Near the top and bottom of the image you'll see a mottled pattern. That is a glimpse of the CMB; the remains of the fireball out of which our Universe sprang into existence 13.7 billion years ago.
This image is only the start of the amazing data that is to come from Planck. Planck is imaging the entire sky every 8 months or so and that means it produces lots of data. There is plenty of work ahead, and at least two full surveys of the sky are required to fully calibrate everything, so the first cosmological science isn't expected until 2012. In a couple of years, we should expect to see a much better and higher resolution view of the Universe. Meanwhile, my congratulations to all the people that have worked on Planck over the past 20 years. The hard work was certainly worth it.
* It doesn't help that the filename contains "FSM" (which actually stands for "full-sky map").
Comments: Planck All-sky
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Posted by Ron on Tuesday 13th Jul 2010 (15:06 UTC)
interising article...
Posted by tanie auta on Tuesday 20th Jul 2010 (08:41 UTC)
Would it be possible to put a marker on the annotated version that would show the location of the earth for those of us that would like to know?
Thank You
C. Webster Rose
Posted by C. Webster Rose on Thursday 19th Aug 2010 (18:26 UTC)
Usually, all-sky images are made from the surface of the Earth looking outwards and so the Earth is where the view is from, not of; it is a bit like wondering where your camera is in a picture you take with it.
In the case of Planck however, the image isn't from the surface of the Earth so you might rightly expect the Earth to appear in the image. However, the Earth (and Sun) would be *really* bright to Planck so the spacecraft is specifically designed to look in directions away from the Earth/Sun (which are in pretty much the same direction from Planck's vantage point). At any moment in time that stops the spacecraft looking at the sky in the Earth/Sun direction but as the Earth orbits the Sun that part of the sky becomes visible. This is one of the reasons it takes at least 6 months to build up and image of the full sky.
Posted by Stuart on Thursday 19th Aug 2010 (21:54 UTC)