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."
know your audience (Score:2)
at very long wavelengths — much longer than what we can sense with our eyes.
Thanks for that.
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Sun ? What's this ?
"A big fiery ball in the center of our solar system, but that's not important right now ... "
/.
\\not obscure on
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"Is noh Tiny, vely biiiiiig wavelength. You need eye-upglade..."
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Lófasz! Nehogy már! Te vagy a Blade... Blade Runner!
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Chinese have trouble with Rs (no R sound in Chinese), Japanese have trouble with Ls (no L sound in Japanese).
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Chicken (Score:1)
Faster than light expansion.... (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the article, one of the goals of this mission is to look for signs of "Faster than light expansion" that occurred shortly after creation of the universe.
This really excites me, it implies, that there existed conditions in our very own universe where at some point we had faster than light travel.
More thank likely not in our lifetime, however if it happened once, its bound to be discovered "how" and potentially exploited to achieve FTL.
Just my 0.02$
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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
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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:Faster than light expansion.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw a presentation a few months ago by someone who was involved in this research.
basically, they see fluctuations in this picture, and these fluctuations are in fact quantum fluctuations (or traces of) that have been blown up by the sheer speed of expansion at that particular time. this is one interesting thing they can see.
on the basis of various correlations they can also impose limits on string theories. the various models have some parameters, and these measurements put bounds on those parameters.
any FTL traveling was actually relative motion between pieces that were far away from each other; since quantum fluctuations can be seen, it's obvious something like this happened. You are right in assuming this can't probably be used for tricks.
but, since this research will lead to a better model of the universe, (think of it as the mother of all experiments, because they are actually measuring the big bang), it is more than likely that any possible FTL tricks we'll ever find will be related in some way to these studies.
for anyone spotting mistakes: please feel free to reveal them. I aim to understand, so I need to be told when I'm being an idiot.
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.
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Re:At the risk of hurting someone (Score:5, Insightful)
No. I hate hearing this kind of stuff from people who should know better.
However, the silly justifications and flowery language work well with the politicians, who have to be convinced to pay for this stuff. I'm sure most of the people working on Plank would dance in a furry bear costume in front of Congress if it would get them the time and money they need to do the work and be left alone.
I've learned that scientists are a lot like serious artists and musicians. You should just give them the gear they need to work and then let them be. Don't ask for quarterly reports, don't ask for balance sheets. Just toss them whatever equipment they request and an occasional sandwich and get out the way.
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Something like this [youtube.com]?
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I've learned that scientists are a lot like serious artists and musicians.
No they aren't. Serious artists and musicians get paid for results. There is this myth that you just give stuff to scientists, don't supervise them, and you will get wonderful things in return. My view is that doesn't work in practice. If a scientist is willing to dance in a bear costume to get funding, then they're will do real science for funding. That's good enough for me.
Re:At the risk of hurting someone (Score:4, Interesting)
I think most scientists would rather do real science for funding but quickly find out that the funding they obtain that way is greatly limited while the "dance in a bear suit" approach gets you a lot more funding. So they grit their teeth, do the little dance and then get back to real science until their funding runs low again.
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From a research perspective, the optimal program is the one with the smallest gap between what you say you're going to do with the funding and what you have to actually do in order to advance science in some rigorous and meaningful way.
This perspective doesn't breed cynicism, it's simply realistic. Much as everyone would like to narrow the gap, criteria for a successful grant proposal are not quite the same as for doing actual science.
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That would be news to must artists and musicians.
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That would be news to must artists and musicians.
I did preface it with the adjective "serious". Having said that, how many artists and musicians do you know who just get money, paid in advance, to "do" art? There is the idea of art commissions and sometimes a record label will pay an advance for a band, but these things aren't particularly common nor are they a dominant form of income. Public funding of science is remarkably different in that virtually all of the funding is paid for things that you will do rather than things that you did.
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Don't ask for quarterly reports, don't ask for balance sheets. Just toss them whatever equipment they request and an occasional sandwich and get out the way.
You are putting a hell of a lot of trust in people who in the end behave just like everyone else.
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I hear what you're saying, but as long as there's a near infinite number of possible science projects and a quite finite level of funding there has to be priorities. On the detailed level you can have science boards, but what about the overall level? How do you decide what degree of funding you'll give to science overall or Hubble versus CERN, for example? Both are ridiculously far into basic science, if you asked the scientists what measurable gains society would get the answer would be ridiculously strain
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...Just toss them whatever equipment they request and an occasional sandwich...
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actually, that is the real justification. top scientists dream of things normal people call lame and stupid.
However, society found that these dreamers are useful, because they stumble onto stuff that engineers can use.
what is the justification of becoming a champion tennis/football player (since it's the season)? sports was, is and always will be a dick measuring contest (even for women). so is science, for each individual scientist. you can't change that, it's in the genes.
PLANCK_FSM_03_Black.jpg (Score:2)
1400 x 900 is now considered hi-res? (Score:1)
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Compared the the state of the art before this, definitely.
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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.
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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.
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Probably a bit late now for anyone to notice, but let me add a comment here as one of the people that made the Planck image.
The actual full resolution Planck data are far better than the WMAP data, but we have only been able to release a deliberately degraded version of the Planck data at this time. Indeed, we pretty decided to degrade it to WMAP resolution precisely because those data are already in the public domain.
Why? Because the scientists who spent more than a decade designing and building the Pl
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It's ashame that you're forced to do this.
Anyway... as long as you're here: is there any way of obtaining the data as the texture of a sphere? I know that in practice that's what it is, and I think watching it from inside a sphere would make much more sense. and it would be kind of cool.
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NASA regularly releases images whose size dwarfs 1400 x 900. For example, the full size on "A Matter Of Perspective" ( http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1695.html [nasa.gov] ) is 4,888 x 2,000.
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That's an image from WISE. The WISE telescope images down to wavelengths of 22 microns. Planck's HIGH FREQUENCY detector is sensitive to wavelengths in the range of 300 microns and the low frequency instruments go down to 1 cm. There's a wee bit of a difference there.
All under 1K? (Score:2)
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Axis units? (Score:2)
Am I the only one who wants to see some units?
I know that we can see the milky way, and that the bright band in the middle is that same milky way... but the night's sky is different in winter and summer, and it's different on both hemispheres.
In other words: the galaxy is all around us, and I want to know what part is where.
A good graph has units and numbers, you insensitive clods.
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Look at the bbc article. There is a check box on top of the image that shows where some things you may know are on the maps.
Also : http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMF2FRZ5BG_index_1.html
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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.