Planck Satellite Releases First Images 59
davecl writes "The Planck Satellite has released its first images. These are from the 'First Look Survey' and show a strip of the sky scanned at a range of radio and submillimetre wavelengths. The results are already better than what was seen by the previous microwave background satellite, WMAP. More details and images available in English and French. The Planck Mission Blog contains more details of the project and continuing coverage. I maintain the mission blog but even I am impressed with these first images!"
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Fucking excellent.
stds, not so good.
Re:W00T! (Score:4, Funny)
I don't even know what I'm looking at. It looks like something I could have made with my Commodore Amiga.
English and French Images (Score:5, Funny)
Were you accidentally looking at the French images? Try the English ones and see if that helps.
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Money well spent compared to someone trying to shoot a dude/dudette to Mars just for the hell of it, and come up with a viable research question they may answer in the process as an afterthought.
Manned spaceflight is dick swinging.
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Manned spaceflight
Manned exploration. People opposed to exploration seem like they must be among the most uninteresting people imaginable.
Apropos, some people decry space science, because it won't tell us anything about things here on Earth (which is not entirely true, but true enough in the way they mean it). Some people explore space through a telescope, some from the tip of a rocket.
It's rather hypocritical to applaud one form of exploration, but deride the other. They're both important human endeavors.
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Wouldn't it be easier to send eggs and sperm to Mars and then have them combine and incubate there?
Amiga created the universe??? (Score:2)
I don't even know what I'm looking at. It looks like something I could have made with my Commodore Amiga.
I've heard ridiculous claims from Amiga fans before, but are you actually claiming that an Amiga can be used to create the universe?
Extra ! (Score:2)
Breaking news !
The universe is green with blotches of red !
Details to follow !
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I've been Waiting For This (Score:4, Interesting)
To cut down on costs we were going to use the receivers from sky's satellite dishes since theres millions of the things, combined with a form of interference.
My job was supposed to be (until I suddenly was swamped with other responsibilities and had to leave the project) to write the code that would create montecarlo simulations of the project.
Was a while ago since I left I wonder how they have gotten on with it now.
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Ah yes, karma whoring with nothing more than a stock quote from Monty Python. A prime example of the failure of slashdot.
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Franchement débile. I have no praise for your english reading skills...
More details and images available in English and French.
Mais il est vrai qu'après tout, c'est Slashdot.
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During one of the wars that the French fought against the British, the French just happened to capture a British Major.
An officer brought the Major to the French General for interrogation.
The French General began ridiculing the Major for wearing "that stupid red tunic."
The French General said,
"Why to you wear that red uniform, it makes it easy for us to shoot you."
The British major replied,
"If I do get wounded, the blood will not show, and my soldiers will not get scared."
The French general said,
"That is a
From TFA (Score:3, Interesting)
The detectors are looking for variations in the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background that are about a million times smaller than one degree â" this is comparable to measuring from Earth the body heat of a rabbit sitting on the Moon.
The body heat of a rabbit sitting on the moon? Interesting example.
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... Sitting on the moon during the day or sitting on the moon during the night?
Doesn't the temperature change from freezing the rabbit to frying the rabbit?
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Perhaps a badger would be better.
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Wouldn't it be the other way; find the rabbit on Earth by body heat from the moon?
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From what distance could you detect a burning library of congress-
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How many flaming moon bunnies = 1 burning LoC?
Well worth it (Score:2)
Am I hopelessly geeky... (Score:4, Funny)
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With NASA's budget the way it is, that's all we could afford...
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Planck is actually an ESA mission, not NASA. Though our US colleagues have made significant contributions the bulk of the funding, the launch etc. has come from Europe.
I wish they'd post a bit of the sky from both... (Score:4, Interesting)
I am very curious to see Planck's resolution compared to the W-MAP. Just zoom into a bit of the map, and show them side by side, that's all I ask! They do have some nice zooms of the map on the french-language site, and I suppose if I wasn't so lazy I could find the corresponding sections in the W-MAP output. I know that Planck can detect the polarization of the CMB, I'm just dying to see what that will show us!
I've read several times that while Planck has many times the resolution and sensitivity of the W-MAP probe, there's really no more information to be gained beyond Planck. It will give us almost every bit of information that the cosmic background radiation has for us. It's kind of amazing, really.
Re:I wish they'd post a bit of the sky from both.. (Score:4, Informative)
There's a lot more to do beyond Planck on polarization, but you're right that primary intensity anisotropies in the CMB will essentially be done by Planck. There are lots of secondary anisotropies, such as the SZ-Effect, on smaller scales to be done at higher resolution, though, and instruments like the SPT [uchicago.edu] are doing exactly that.
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Here you go. [lbl.gov] (The Planck data in this picture is simulated.)
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Here is a high resolution image from the article: http://www.esa.int/images/FIRST_LIGHT_SURVEY.jpg [esa.int]
Here is a high resolution image from the WMAP data: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/WMAP_2008_94GHz.png [wikimedia.org]
Enjoy.
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If you're talking about the image that shows the strip of sky Plank observed superimposed on a visible light picture, then that's the Milky Way.
If you're talking about the other images, then I'm not sure which patch we're talking about, since there's a number of bright-ish patches.
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No idea what that is... but you can see other similarly bright spots outside of the milky way, so whatever it is probably not unusual? Another galaxy maybe?
English and French (Score:2)
More details and images available in English and French.
What's the difference between an English image and a French image?
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What's the difference between an English image and a French image?
The French images are red-shifted.
Plancks Scan Pattern Is Bad? (Score:2)
I was left wondering about the scan pattern shown in the animation "Planck scanning the sky". I have no idea if it matches what the satellite actually does, but if it does then it seems they would gain a much better image at 'the center of the galaxy' by altering the axis of the scan pattern so the 'poles' of the scan point to it. In the animation the scanning 'poles' are currently aimed at the the section in the galaxy with the least information (the very top and bottom of the light survey image), and it
Re:Plancks Scan Pattern Is Bad? (Score:4, Informative)
The poles of the scan are actually the ecliptic poles, perpendicular to the plane of the planets within the solar system. This is set by the fact that Planck rotates with it's bottom pointing towards the line that joins the earth and the sun from it's position at the second Lagrange point. This ensures that earth and sunlight never impinge on it's sensitive detectors and helps to keep the whole instrument as cold as possible. The scan geometry is thus quite tightly restricted by these requirements and, as you say, the deepest fields will be at the ecliptic poles.
We actually don't want to study the centre of the galaxy with Planck as the galaxy is the major foreground contaminant to the CMB data. Fortunately the eclptic poles aren't aligned wiht the centre of the galaxy.
Yo Planck scientists! (Score:1)
Image*s*??? (Score:3, Funny)
I'd expect the Planck satellite to provide just one very small constant image.
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Protip - what you're looking for is abiogenesis.
Yeah, I'm not sure he's "looking" for anything outside his own navel. :)
I do always love it when someone has a problem with existing theory because of "fudge factors" that help the theory fit experimental evidence, and their replacement is some ill-formed philosophy that is, essentially, one giant fudge factor with no experimental evidence or connection to reality. Because that's good science.
Hint to crackpots: Science, and especially physics, is prone to ma
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If the universe is Googolplexs as opposed to billions of years old, it substantially increases the odds of that life could have started elsewhere and evolved over a much longer period time giving it LOT more time to spread throughout the universe reaching Earth as well as other planets. (Spores in meteorites etc..)
Panspermia is a possible origin for life on earth in either case. Sure, a ridiculously ancient universe means panspermia could have happened over larger areas, but why is that so significant? It