Planck Mission Releases Images of Galactic Dust

davecl writes "The Planck satellite has released its first new science images, showing the large scale filamentary structure of cold dust in our own galaxy. This release coincides with the completion of its first survey of the entire sky a couple of weeks ago. There's lots more work to be done, and more observations to be made, before results are ready on the Big Bang, but these images demonstrate Planck's performance and capability. More information is available on the Planck mission blog (which I maintain)."

Comments

Re:Size?

[vlm]

When talking about things at the galaxy scale, what is considered dust? Is this actual real "dust" of the size that collects on my shelves, grains of sand sized bits, gravel, or something larger?

The phrase to google for is "cosmic dust"

You'll be displeased with the answer, it seems to be a very wide range of stuff from two molecules having a public display of affection all the way up to the low end of vaguely sand-like.

I don't really know what collects on your shelves, but "cosmic dust" is probably vaguely similar.

This sand and gravel stuff you talk about, is by definition a "meteor".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_dust

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor

Re:Size?

[c 0xFF]

APOD has a good description and picture (well, computer-generated visualization) of dust:

By studying how dust absorbs, emits, and reflects light, astronomers do know that interstellar dust is much different than the cell and lint based dust found around a typical house. Interstellar dust grains are composed mostly of carbon, silicon, and oxygen and are usually less than about 1/1000 of a millimeter across. Recent work indicates that most dust grains are not spherical. The above picture shows the result of a fractal adhesion model for dust grains involving random conglomerates of spherical compounds of different properties, here artificially highlighted by different colors.

(from http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap961119.html)