First Science from Planck

Cosmic Variance
By Sean Carroll
Jan 12, 2011 2:12 AMNov 20, 2019 1:12 AM

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The Planck Surveyor satellite, a European mission to observe the cosmic microwave background (and various things that get in the way), has released its first science results. 25 papers in all!

I haven't absorbed all the goodness as yet, so I'll just point you to more interesting resources -- e.g. blog posts by Peter Coles or Andrew Jaffe, or this BBC article if you prefer your media more mainstream. Note that these are not, for the most part, results about the cosmic microwave background and all the yummy cosmological goodness one hopes to derive therefrom. There's a lot about dust in our own galaxy, as well as infrared emission from some of the very earliest galaxies in the universe. (Much of this is relevant, of course, to straightening out possible anomalies in the actual CMB.) CMB results are expected circa January 2013. That's when I'll win my bet with Max Tegmark.

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