One Last Map of the Ancient Universe Revealed From Defunct Spacecraft's Data
The astronomers behind a universe-mapping satellite have released the project’s final set of processed data. What you see above is the newest image of the oldest visible light in the Universe—microwave radiation from just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.
The European Space Agency launched the Planck satellite in 2009, and the telescope finished taking data in 2013. The researchers released the first dataset in 2013, another in 2015, and now the final, “legacy” dataset last week—but it doesn’t answer all of the remaining questions about the early Universe.
The Planck mission measured the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to the greatest precision yet. After the Big Bang, physicists think that the Universe quickly inflated, then began cooling down and slowed, though it’s still expanding today. Light bounced around until 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when atoms began capturing electrons, after which the light traveled unimpeded until scientists measured it here on Earth. The expanding Universe stretched out those light waves so much that they became microwaves. This light is visible in every direction we look, and it represents the structure of the early Universe.
The CMB light is incredibly uniform. Though it looks red and blue on the map, these colors represent temperature differences of tiny fractions of a degree, averaging out to 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.
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