Planck satellite finds new galaxy supercluster
Friday, September 17, 2010 - 03:49
in Astronomy & Space
Surveying the microwave sky, the Planck satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) has obtained qualitatively new images of galaxy clusters - even revealing one of them to be a previously unknown supercluster. The largest objects in the Universe are detected by means of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, a characteristic signature that the clusters imprint on the cosmic microwave background radiation. This effect was predicted in 1969 by Rashid Sunyaev, presently director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and Yakov Zel'dovich. With the Planck satellite the effect is being used for the first time in a large-scale search for galaxy clusters...