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The European Space Agency's Planck mission team has released the spacecraft's first full map, charting the entire sky from August 2009 to June 2010. The image, centered on the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy, represents wavelengths from microwave to far infrared.
The Andromeda Galaxy appears as a small diagonal streak on the left side of the map, below the Milky Way's galactic plane, and bright smudges below center on the right side mark two other galactic neighbors, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds. (Click here for a labeled map.)
Toward the top and bottom of the map, away from the foreground structures of the Milky Way and its companion galaxies, is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, remnant light emitted 380,000 years after the big bang. An earlier NASA satellite, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), uncovered a bounty of cosmological data by measuring subtle temperature fluctuations across the CMB, and Planck promises to take an even closer look, potentially providing a test of key cosmological theories.
Now that Planck has mapped the sky, the hard work begins; researchers must painstakingly remove the foreground light sources to get a clear view of the cosmic microwave background. According to a news release from NASA, a participant in the mission, the process will take about two years.
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18 Comments
Add CommentIt would be helpful to know the gradients of the false color wavelength mapping.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe further out we get in exploring the universe, the longer we extend the chain of assumptions on which we depend for understanding what we find. I think our science should first put more emphasis on saving this planet and it's cultures from an increasingly chaotic future from which we may not survive, tending to end our explorations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan someone help me out here? and explain to me what we are actually seeing. Because my logic says that this CMB image relates to a time before the creation of mass or if after. Surely then light left this vicinity, eventually going into the future where our mass would one day occupy - considering the speed we are travelling in relation to light. Therefore, isn't the image we see a future time and space that we will again occupy?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe wast our economy looking for space rocks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes it not seam as though it would be cheaper to accept christianity? To find other world to live on because eventually the earth will disapear. how many people could we feed with all this money we dump continually?
Kechibuku - I'm not qualified to respond to your request, but anticipating no useful response from anyone more capable...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't think its really clear, since the image method wasn't fully explained, but I think that the various false colors in this image indicate the various wavelengths detected, somewhere in the infrared (typically emitted from gaseous regions) to microwave most commonly the extremely weak emissions of space dubbed the CMB.
To address your question, I think that material emission sources outshine the weak CMB emissions except in the upper left and lower right areas of the sky image. The rest of the image seems to be dominated by infrared emissions of spatially distributed gases.
The article describes the infrared emissions as being in the 'foreground', with the microwave emission source in the 'background', I think there is no direct evidence supporting this view.
Alternatively, if the weak microwave signal was continuously emitted from throughout spacetime, produced for example by the ubiquitous energetic expansion of spacetime, I think it would not be distinguishable from more luminous material sources. As a result, the microwaves emitted from space appear to be emitted only in the 'background'.
The idea that light should have already passed our location is difficult to explain and is usually not undertaken - good question! I think this is best understood by realizing that the light we detect is only the intercepted light that had been directed towards our current location in space and time.
Other light emissions filling even the area of the sky that seems to be empty of light sources are not directed towards us and therefore cannot be detected by our telemetry.
Not to (further) confuse things, but I suspect that much of the light from the more distant objects that we observe has reached us by a slightly curved path through billions of light years of expanding spacetime. As a result, sky oriented positional light emission surveys such as this and the WMAP CMB data provide us with a deceptive view of the location of observed objects: their light may not have even been emitted from their apparent relative location in our current sky...
Good question. I'm sorry I couldn't answer completely with 'proven' perspectives, but I hope I've helped.
bigbaddude - If you feed them, they will multiply.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishere's a current pic thanks to sam on science....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/jarrett/papers/LSS/2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW.jpg
Wayne Williamson - Thanks - interesting image. It's a somewhat similar sky map, color coded by redshift, with large scale structures nicely labeled by Jarrett, apparently in 2004. The Plank satellite was launched in 2009: its first map shown above was compiled from observations made from 8/09-6/10 and released this month (7/10). It has two sets of instruments, one infrared with six frequency bands, one microwave with three bands.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWayne Williamson: What a great link!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjtdwyer: Thanks for the additional info.
As to the CMB, if I understand correctly it permeats all space, here, there, everywhere. The earlier green and yellow map (from the WMAP) is probably as you describe, a compilation of snapshots of the gravity altered emissions that happened to arrive at the instruments at that moment they were recorded. I would then consider the image from Plank to be of similar context, just using more sensitive instruments and different color coding for this particular image.
Kechibuku: One might expect that the earliest remnant of the big bang (the CMB) would form a spherical shell at the most distant detectable radius from our location. However, that the radiation is detected from all directions by a very local spacecraft would indicate that it does permeat all space. A crude earthly analogy would be that it is the smoke left in the vicinity of fireworks, not the bits that flew apart in the explosion. Happy (belated) Independance Day!
tichead - Again, I agree. Regarding the CMB, I suspect that is ubiquitous continuous emission is related to the sporadic annihilation of virtual particles throughout spacetime, as the residual energy released at the universe initialization expands the spacetime it produced. But, I'm just guessing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the consensus astrophysical conception of the CMB is of an initial emission of infrared EM that occurred in the very early universe that has since redshifted into microwave spectra.
In this view, according to Wikipedia, the early universe consisted of a dense, opaque plasma of elementary particles, including photons. As the plasma cooled and expanded, quarks formed protons and neutrons and then condensed with electrons to form atoms, suddenly making the plasma less dense, transparent to photons, allowing their initial emission, forming the CMB.
I don't understand where the photons went to, outside of the plasma universe, or where they're supposed to be coming from now, but this view is apparently crucial to the current understanding of cosmology.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can explain what happens to the CMB after the universe becomes transparent until now - I'm confused.
I'm a sciences teacher in puerto Rico this images are very interesting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJose L. Vega
Colegio San Carlos Aguadilla
By Dan Visser, Almere, the Netherlands, July 11 2010.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe universe is a double torus. (Preview: Read the full article on www.darkfieldnavigator.com, the webbutton "Evidence TTM", wherein also the weblinks are given in the viXra-archive to present the first papers about the TTM).
A new cosmological Twin-Tori Model (TTM) predicts the universe is a double torus. The big bang is a deceptive appearance in this Twin-Tori universe. Intuition, analysis and new mathematics of three scientists, Dan Visser (Netherlands), Christopher Forbes and colleague (England) proclaim that the shape of our universe is a torus of dark energy, which encloses and intertwines an inner located torus of dark matter. In the dark matter torus also the visible- and baryonic matter is located (e.a. protons and neutrons). So, we might live in a double torus universe.
According to Dan Visser something remarkable is at hand. Therefore, it is of crucial importance, you dont imaging yourself in a big bang universe, but in a double torus !
In a first thought you would think, while being located inside that inner dark matter torus, that one side of the image is more intensely detailed with spixels (temperature variations) than the other side. This is because of the bending of the inner torus, while looking forward into it. Then the observation of spixels is thought to be closer nearby. This was the first note Dan Visser made on of May 28 2010 on his website. Looking further away into the torus, by trying to follow the bending of the inner-torus, you would expect to observe less details, because then the observation of "spixels" is to far to detect. The Planck-satelite looks equally sharp in every direction !! So, a second effect might be the image should show a wider band at one, or the other side of the image, because of the bending of the inner torus !! Surprisingly, if you look at the image of the Planck-satelite, then indeed the image shows an averaged slightly thicker band at the right side compared to the left side!! This involves also several object-structures far away outside the Milkyway, which take part of the bending of a torus.
Then Dan Visser got a bright new idea: Directly derived from the Twin-Tori Model, he showed an interesting equation, which seemed to produce a general dimension for the CMB-radiation of the big bang in the double torus. The equation is the ratio of the amount of dark energy and dark energy force. The CMB is expressed as part of the Twin-Tori Model. This is quite a new perpective and I challenge physicists to react.
Plodding on as best I can, my understanding of the consensus represented by Wikipedia states (paraphrased) that the early universe consisted of an exceedingly dense, opaque plasma of extremely energetic elementary particles. As the plasma universe expanded and cooled quarks formed protons and neutrons, then condensed with electrons to form simple hydrogen atoms. Suddenly the universe became transparent to light. The hot atoms could no longer contain their energy: they emitted infrared photons. Those initial photons have propagated through expanding spacetime unimpeded ever since, diminishing their luminosity and redshifting into microwave frequencies, now being detected by WMAP, Planck and other receivers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a few questions regarding this scenario, especially how did these photons escape detection (interaction with matter) in the still extremely dense, relatively small universe into which they were emitted? If they had been continuously absorbed and reemitted by the still exceedingly hot atoms, their redshift and luminosity would reflect the properties of their most recent emission.
I suggest that the CMB may include some photons emitted shortly following the universe initiation, but it also include photons being somehow continuously sparsely emitted at low microwave frequencies from the now much cooler energies of spacetime. They may be emitted by the physical process that expands spacetime. These emissions are effectively randomly directed from their sources.
In this case, the microwave background emissions more directly represent the ongoing expansion of spacetime, more than the initial release of energy. I'm still just guessing here: if anyone can dispute this suggestion please do so.
In that case, why are you even reading this?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, the statement is often made that all the explosions we know about produce a very clumpy distribution of matter, not the very smooth distribution indicated by the CMB data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, the explosions we're familiar with are produced by the rapid conversion of mass into energy. It's most likely that the process that produced the initial matter in our universe was not this type of explosion.
It seems more likely that the 'big bang' was a conversion of perhaps gravitational energy into matter, space and time.
A more complete description of the Large Scale Structure sky map image referred to by Wayne Williamson can be found at:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW_Nasa.jpg
It explains that the basis for that image is a near infrared composite image combined with many additional information sources. Very enlightening - thanks again, Wayne.
Lame people are those who cry about space study over money and religion. You facisist always try to crush the dreams of others because you have none of value to life and happiness. Learn to be free in mind and in the world you live in and stop trying to control every one. Thank you for the wonderful look into our universe and may capitolism allow us to see it all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey have plenty of work ahead...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Kechibuku, you are looking at our local galaxy cluster... or atleast some of it.