First Full-Sky Image From Planck Mission

krou writes "Six months of work has produced a remarkable full-sky map from Planck. 'It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths — much longer than what we can sense with our eyes. Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now. ... Of particular note are the huge streamers of cold dust that reach thousands of light-years above and below the galactic plane. "What you see is the structure of our galaxy in gas and dust, which tells us an awful lot about what is going on in the neighborhood of the Sun; and it tells us a lot about the way galaxies form when we compare this to other galaxies," observed Professor Andrew Jaffe, a Planck team member from Imperial College London, UK.' The ESA has more details on their website, with a higher-res JPG available."

Comments

Re:Faster than light expansion....

[radtea]

for anyone spotting mistakes: please feel free to reveal them.

There's nothing really to correct, just an additional comment on why this sort of study is interesting: we don't know what drove inflation, nor even exactly when it occured, nor, in point of fact, if it did occur.

Inflation is by far the most natural mechanism we know of that produces a universe as flat as our own. So on that basis we'd really like for there to have been one. An inflationary era occurs when the rate of expansion of the universe increases with time in the early going, probably due to a phase transition in the vacuum field of an elementary particle.

We know such phase transitions exist: electro-weak theory is based on the spontaneous breaking of a symmetry that is strictly observed at high energy, in much the same way that the rotational and translational symmetry of a liquid is broken by the process of crystalization as the temperature drops sufficiently for it to become a solid.

But we know that the electro-weak symmetry breaking was too late to induce the kind of early inflationary era necessary to produce a universe as perfectly balanced between open and closed as the one we see.

By studying the details of the CMB we can learn more about when and what kind of inflation occured, or in the best case we can find something that is inconsistent with inflation having occured at all, which would be hugely exciting. It would set a big chunk of modern cosmology on its ear. Alternatively, we might be able to pin down specific properties of the phase transition that drove the inflationary era, and distinguish between string-theoretic explanations and more mundane ones.