Planck
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The Planck Space Telescope
An artist's concept of the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope. Image credit: NASA
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Planck's View of Orion
The big Hunter in the sky is seen in a new light by Planck, a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation. The long-wavelength image shows most of the constellation Orion, highlighting turbid clouds of cold material.
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Planck Sees Perseus
A low activity, star-formation region in the constellation Perseus, as seen by the European Space Agency's Planck.
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Tendrils of Cold Dust
This three-color combination constructed from ESA Planck's two highest frequency channels and an image obtained with the NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite shows local dust structures within 500 light-years of the sun.
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All-sky Image of Molecular Gas and Three Molecular Cloud Complexes seen by Planck
This all-sky image shows the distribution of carbon monoxide (CO), a molecule used by astronomers to trace molecular clouds across the sky, as seen by Planck.
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Galactic Haze seen by Planck and Galactic 'Bubbles' seen by Fermi
This all-sky image shows the distribution of the galactic haze seen by ESA's Planck mission at microwave frequencies superimposed over the high-energy sky, as seen by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
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Planck's First Glimpse at the Universe
One of Planck's first images is shown as a strip superimposed over a two dimensional projection of the whole sky as seen in visible light.
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The Mysterious Galactic Haze seen by Planck
This all-sky image shows the spatial distribution over the whole sky of the galactic haze at 30 and 44 GHz, extracted from the Planck observations.
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Mission Summary
Designed to study ancient radiation from the big bang, the Planck space telescope is a European Space Agency mission that aims to better understand the origin of the universe and the formation of galaxies. Planck produced its first all-sky image in 2010, and scientists are currently working to analyze and parse the various and complex elements. Analysis has already highlighted numerous star-forming clouds across the Milky Way galaxy as well as a previously invisible population of galaxies covered in dust billions of years old.
NASA has significant participation in the Planck mission, which uses instruments from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Scientific Instrument(s)
- Low Frequency Instrument (LFI)
- High Frequency Instrument (HFI)
