#7: The Map of Everything


In July the European Space Agency released a new map showing the universe in its infancy, 13.7 billion years ago—just 300,000 years after the Big Bang. In this full-sky image, created with data from the new Planck space telescope, red and orange areas represent primordial lumps that gave rise to giant clusters of galaxies. The blue and white zones comprise very different signals, mostly emissions from relatively nearby clouds of gas and dust in our galaxy. Planck scientists plan to strip out those local features to get an even clearer picture of the early evolution of the cosmos. A full release of data is coming in two years.