First Light From Planck-- And Why It Matters
Friday, September 18, 2009 - 02:21
in Astronomy & Space
Planck, a European-US collaborative mission launched by ESA, has provided its first pictures. Planck is a followup to WMAP, and looks at the cosmic microwave background. But it has a host of other detectors and purposes, too. Stealing blatently from Wikipedia, Planck will do: High resolution detections of both the total intensity and polarization of the primordial CMB anisotropies Creation of a catalogue of galaxy clusters through the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect Observations of the gravitational lensing of the CMB, as well as the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect read more