Planck Mission Releases Images of Galactic Dust 40
davecl writes "The Planck satellite has released its first new science images, showing the large scale filamentary structure of cold dust in our own galaxy. This release coincides with the completion of its first survey of the entire sky a couple of weeks ago. There's lots more work to be done, and more observations to be made, before results are ready on the Big Bang, but these images demonstrate Planck's performance and capability. More information is available on the Planck mission blog (which I maintain)."
High-Res? (Score:2, Interesting)
Fractals! (Score:3, Interesting)
FTA: One puzzle to be solved is why there is similar filamentary structure on both the large and the small scale. "That's a big question," says Tauber.
Interesting that these filaments could probably be modeled using fractals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal [wikipedia.org]
Looks like Vernor Vinge's "Zones" (Score:4, Interesting)
In Vernor Vinge's fantastic book "A Fire Upon The Deep", he postulates the existence of "Zones" where variations in cosmic constants(?) allow increasingly sophisticated intelligences (and corresponding FTL travel). We (earth) live in the "Slow Zone" where only human level intelligence is possible.
Anyway these pictures, with their galactic scale structures showing Fractal like properties, reminds me of that!
By the way, the book really is awesome (Hugo and Nebula winner) just about the best SF I've read along with Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude". If you're a slashdot geek (and aren't we all?) you'll love his galactic Internet (he's a computer science professor). Oh, and he is credited with the idea of the "Singularity".
Book Scanning (Score:1, Interesting)
This looks like someone simply scanned the cover from a 1970's science fiction paperback. It's beautiful on many levels.