ESA Unveils Extraordinary Image of Universe Taken by Planck Space Telescope

An extraordinary new image of the universe has been unveiled by the European Space Agency, pieced together from photos taken by the Planck space telescope.

Photo: ESA Unveils Extraordinary Image of Universe Taken by Planck Space Telescope

ESA Unveils Extraordinary Image of Universe Taken by Planck Space Telescope

The telescope was sent into space last year to survey the "oldest light" in the cosmos, and took just over six months to assemble the map, BBC News reports.

The Planck scientific teams are currently working on the data collected during the first 12 months of operations, teasing out the cosmological signal from the combination of all nine maps of the sky.

The careful analysis of the galactic foreground emission that is required in this process will - as a by-product - improve tremendously our knowledge of the structure of the Milky Way; among many other important astrophysical results, it will enable a detailed study of the large-scale structure in our Galaxy and, in particular, a three-dimensional reconstruction of the structure of the ISM including its tenuous magnetic field, Space Daily informs.