What Planck saw: the most detailed map ever created of the universe's cosmic microwave background

ESA today released a map of relic radiation (microwave sky) from the Big Bang, composed of data gathered by ESA's Planck satellite, launched in May 2009 to study Cosmic Microwave Background. The 50-million pixel, all-sky image of the oldest light adds an edge of precision to some existing cosmological theories, defining more precisely the composition of the Universe and its age -- about 80 million years older than previously thought. "What we are seeing is a picture of the microwave sky, a picture of the Universe as it was 380,000 after the Big Bang," George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, told journalists.
Illustration: ESA and the Planck Collaboration