Esa’s Planck spacecraft has finished scanning the entire sky in it’s mission to map the light from the beginning of time.
Quite a while ago…13.7 billion years in fact, the Big Bang happened, an event of unimaginable power that spewed out all the matter, energy, time, and everything else we do not even know about yet. The subtle afterglow left over from the wrath of the birth of the universe is called the cosmic microwave background radiation, and we can “see” it spread across the sky.
Well to be more precise the European Space Agency’s Planck Spacecraft can see it, and this is one cool piece of space hardware. By cool I mean cool as in cold, Planck operates at -273.05 degrees C, just 0.1 degrees C above absolute zero. As far as we know it, nothing in the universe gets any chillier.
If you take a look at the image at top (click to enlarge), you’ll see that the bright band across the centre dominates. This band is our Galaxy the Milky Way, complete with vast swirling clouds of cool dust that extend above and below the plane. These clouds are the raw materials of new stars and solar systems easily picked out by Planck’s cold detectors. But if you look at the back drop to the Milky Way above and below it you’ll see a mottled pattern, this is the oldest light.
Tiny temperature differences in the Big Bang’s afterglow have resulted in the image showing up as brighter blobs against a darker background. This pattern is the blue print to what the universe is today, everything about it, all the galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters eminated from subtle differences in this cosmic microwave background radiation.
But this image is only the start of things, the Milky Way will eventually be digitally removed to reveal the whole sky, and scientists will be announcing new insights into the cosmos from Planck’s results.
The universe came into being in a mammoth event that originally only gave birth to chaos. After a time of 13.7 billion years that chaos has evolved and is now beginning to know itself.
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