Planck unveils wonders of the Universe
Astronomers reveal galaxy clusters and distant cold objects from space.
Adapted from a news release issued by the UK Space Agency
Monday 17 December 2010
Scientists working on Europe’s Planck spacecraft have released the mission’s first new findings this week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics , revealing the coldest objects in the Universe in greater detail than ever before.
Astronomers from Imperial College London and others from the European Space Agency have discovered massive galaxy clusters and previously unseen and unidentified objects from both our own galaxy (the Milky Way) and the most distant reaches of space.
Planck’s primary goal is to take images of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the afterglow of the Big Bang. Whilst doing so, it will also provide valuable data for a broad range of studies in astrophysics.
"Planck will help us to build a ladder connecting our Milky Way to the faint, distant galaxies and uncovering the evolution of dusty, star forming galaxies throughout cosmic history," said Dr David Clements from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London and part of the Planck team.
One of Planck’s major technological strengths is its ability to detect clumps of very cold gas and dust from which stars are born, and which they create when they die. The astronomers have found over 900 of these dust clumps so far. They also surveyed around 500 galaxies closer than a few billion light years and found that some of them contain much more cold dust than they previously expected.
The researchers also found evidence of previously invisible galaxies that formed new stars at rates some 10–1000 times higher than we see in the Milky Way today. Scientists had never been able to measure these galaxies in such detail before, since the images were contaminated by infrared light associated with dense, dusty regions of the Milky Way.
Data collected by Planck has also found that this mysterious, diffuse light in our own galaxy, whose origin was previously unclear, is coming from dust grains spinning at several tens of billion times a second thanks to collisions with either fast-moving atoms or photons of ultraviolet light. This new understanding is helping the scientists to remove this local microwave ’fog’ from the Planck data with greater precision, leaving the important CMB data untouched and the captured images clearer.
Among the many other results presented today, Planck has also collected new data on clusters of galaxies – the largest structures in the Universe, each containing thousands of galaxies. These show up in the Planck data as compact silhouettes against the CMB. By surveying the whole sky, Planck stands the best chance of finding the most massive examples of these clusters. They are rare and their number is a sensitive probe of the kind of Universe we live in, how fast it is expanding, and how much matter it contains.
The slideshow below displays new images taken by the Planck telescope:
Planck is a flagship mission of the UK Space Agency , which funds the UK’s involvement in both of Planck’s scientific instruments, and the European Space Agency. It was launched in May 2009 and sits more than a million kilometres from Earth. Researchers from a number of UK institutions including Imperial were involved in the design and construction of the satellite, and are now working alongside colleagues from around the world to operate the satellite and analyse the data.
Dr David Parker, Director of Space Science and Exploration for the UK Space Agency, said, "We’re proud to be playing a key role in this amazing discovery machine. These new results are all vital pieces of a jigsaw that could give us a full picture of the evolution of both our own cosmic backyard – the Milky Way galaxy that we live in – as well as the early history of the whole Universe."
