ESA Discovers Unexpected 'Haze' of Microwave Transmissions

astroengine writes "The European space observatory Planck has discovered something peculiar about our galaxy: it's humming in microwaves and, for the moment, the source of the 'hard' radiation surrounding the galaxy's core is a complete mystery. Also, the Milky Way is home to previously unknown 'islands' of cold carbon monoxide gas, helping astronomers uncover the distribution of star-forming regions."

Comments

CO is all over the place in space

[NixieBunny]

I work at a telescope that does similar work. a couple weeks ago, we were doing some tests with the antenna pointed to fixed azimuth/elevation angles, which results in the telescope scanning the sky due to the Earth's rotation. We were watching the spectrum display, and saw many instances of strong (1 Kelvin or bigger) CO lines appear in thoroughly random places, perhaps 5% of the observing time. That's a lot of CO!