First Full-Sky Image From Planck Mission 56
krou writes "Six months of work has produced a remarkable full-sky map from Planck. 'It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths — much longer than what we can sense with our eyes. Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now. ... Of particular note are the huge streamers of cold dust that reach thousands of light-years above and below the galactic plane. "What you see is the structure of our galaxy in gas and dust, which tells us an awful lot about what is going on in the neighborhood of the Sun; and it tells us a lot about the way galaxies form when we compare this to other galaxies," observed Professor Andrew Jaffe, a Planck team member from Imperial College London, UK.' The ESA has more details on their website, with a higher-res JPG available."
Re:Faster than light expansion.... (Score:3, Informative)
If I understand it at all correctly (maybe not?), nothing ever traveled faster than the speed of light.
It's just that the speed of light was much faster shortly after the big bang.
Since then, the nature of the universe has changed, and the speed of light with it.
I don't think there are any FTL tricks to be found there. Someone can hopefully correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:Faster than light expansion.... (Score:2, Informative)
No, I'm quite sure that the hyperinflation theory for the Big Bang states that the expansion of the universe actually exceeded the speed of light. This means then that there are places in the Universe that we will never be able to observe, since the light from these places will be unable to ever reach us.
Re:1400 x 900 is now considered hi-res? (Score:3, Informative)
you have no idea what you're talking about.
the Planck image is made with microwaves.
what you showed is with visible light.
there's a difference.
Re:Faster than light expansion.... (Score:5, Informative)
for anyone spotting mistakes: please feel free to reveal them.
There's nothing really to correct, just an additional comment on why this sort of study is interesting: we don't know what drove inflation, nor even exactly when it occured, nor, in point of fact, if it did occur.
Inflation is by far the most natural mechanism we know of that produces a universe as flat as our own. So on that basis we'd really like for there to have been one. An inflationary era occurs when the rate of expansion of the universe increases with time in the early going, probably due to a phase transition in the vacuum field of an elementary particle.
We know such phase transitions exist: electro-weak theory is based on the spontaneous breaking of a symmetry that is strictly observed at high energy, in much the same way that the rotational and translational symmetry of a liquid is broken by the process of crystalization as the temperature drops sufficiently for it to become a solid.
But we know that the electro-weak symmetry breaking was too late to induce the kind of early inflationary era necessary to produce a universe as perfectly balanced between open and closed as the one we see.
By studying the details of the CMB we can learn more about when and what kind of inflation occured, or in the best case we can find something that is inconsistent with inflation having occured at all, which would be hugely exciting. It would set a big chunk of modern cosmology on its ear. Alternatively, we might be able to pin down specific properties of the phase transition that drove the inflationary era, and distinguish between string-theoretic explanations and more mundane ones.
Re:1400 x 900 is now considered hi-res? (Score:3, Informative)
this one http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/TALKS/Australis/wmap.jpg [sunysb.edu] ?
I really don't want to be an asshole about anything. but you should clearly see that this particular 2198xsmth image from wmap is actually not that detailed. It has more pixels, but the information contained is less than the one in the Planck picture. at least, that's the way I see them, and the human eye is usually good to tell this kind of things.
Re:Faster than light expansion.... (Score:1, Informative)
Sorry, but you're both wrong (and yes, IAAP).
The idea that the speed of light was faster at the big bang is just the creationist's way of explaining away reality. Sorry folks, the speed of light is constant and the universe really is many billions of years old.
During the inflationary period (which is what this part of our universe's history is called), space itself was expanding insanely rapidly. Points in space that used to be able to see each other (i.e., their separation [D] was less than the speed of light [c] times the age of universe [T]) were pushed apart so fast and so far that it was no longer possible for a light beam to reach between them (post-inflation, D > c*T). Space itself is what got big, but nothing ever had a real [as opposed to apparent] velocity greater than the speed of light.
Re:Axis units? (Score:3, Informative)
Uhhh I don't There's no "graph" here. It's a 2-dimensional picture of a 3-dimensional universe. Closer objects will appear bigger than further away objects. You can't exactly draw a "1 cm = 1,000 light years" bar on this image.