PARIS: The Plank Space Observatory, operated by the European Space Agency, has been delivering new and spectacular views of the Milky Way galaxy from its vantage point orbiting the Earth.
While the Milky Way – our own galaxy – is a massive collection of anywhere from 200 billion to 400 billion stars and at least 100 billion planets orbiting those stars, it’s not much to look at from Earth. In most locations there’s hardly anything to be seen from the ground thanks to rampant light pollution; it’s only in rural and remote areas where even a glimpse of its majestic glory can be seen arcing across the night sky in bands of starlight.
However, a new mapping endeavor spearheaded by Planck has brought the majesty of the Milky Way to life in an otherwise unseen way. In addition to taking images of our galaxy in the visible light spectrum, Planck’s instruments also took photographs in other wavelengths, taking images of interstellar gas and dust, magnetic fields, and high energy molecules, all using differently colored filters. Combining the images together create a kaleidoscope of colors that show the Milky Way to be a brilliant, vibrant living galaxy instead of just a barely-discernible smattering of cold white stars.
The new images, while breathtaking, are even more impressive after understanding how long it took for the ESA to put the pictures together – and at what cost. The Planck observatory, which cost $795 million to design and launch, took countless images between 2009 and 2013 to create the mosaic of the Milky Way, all the while looking for cosmic microwave background radiation thought to be left over from the Big Bang that created the universe.
Planck actually helped to disprove some erroneous data last year, when researchers from the BICEP2 initiative had declared that they had discovered evidence of gravitational waves in CMB radiation. Plank’s observations, which indicated no evidence of these gravitational waves, was instrumental in the BICEP2 team ultimately recanting its initial claims, ultimately revealing that interstellar dust had interfered with the team’s findings and misleading them to believe that the gravitational waves were present.
