Full Planck Satellite Data Released With Rich Images of Early Universe

[Reefa]

The 2015 Planck satellite findings have finally been released. The full data set, including the most detailed images of the early universe ever captured, have been made available to the public on the European Space Agency’s website here.

Back in December, Planck lead scientist Jan Tauber told the World Science Festival: “I never would have expected the satellite would have worked so well. It’s as clean a data set as we could have hoped for.”

Launched in 2009, the ESA’s Planck mission, named for Nobel prize-winning physicist Max Planck, has spent four years mapping the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a haze of radiation left over by the Big Bang. This heat map is marked by slight variations in temperature believed to be caused by quantum fluctuations in density and thought to be seeds of the galaxies and stars we see today. In refining these CMB map readings, the latest results bring new clarity to our understanding of the birth and evolution of the universe.

This data set is the second of two hotly anticipated findings released within a week. On Friday, scientists from Planck and the BICEP2 Satellite issued a joint analysis of CMB signals the BICEP2 team initially believed to be evidence of primordial gravitational waves. However, further study concluded the signals were, in fact, distortions in the data. The culprit: interstellar dust in the Milky Way. Details in “International Dustup Over Big Bang Cosmology Ends in a Whimper.”

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[DrKash]