Map of the sky seen by Planck - The microwave sky as seen by Planck...

Map of the sky seen by Planck - The microwave sky as seen by Planck - 380,000 years after the formation of the universe, when the temperature had become low enough, the light could be released from the extremely dense material that imprisoned it and spread throughout the universe. This moment appears to us today in the form of a radiation called fossil radiation, or cosmological diffuse background. This image is the map of temperature fluctuations of the cosmological diffuse background (in orange) seen by the Planck satellite between August 2009 and June 2010. Overlay, in blue, the Lactee Way and clear, filamentary structures that extend beyond the plane of our Lactee Way. This multi-frequency all-sky image of the microwave sky has been composed using data from Planck covering the electromagnetic spectrum from 30 GHz to 857 GHz. The mottled structure of the CMBR, with its tiny temperature fluctuations reflecting the primordial density variations from which today's cosmic structure originated, is clearly visible in the high-latitude regions of the map. The central band is the plane of our Galaxy. A large portion of the image is dominated by the diffuse emission from its gas and dust. The image was derived from data collected by Planck during its first all-sky survey and comes from observations taken between August 2009 and June 2010. To the right of the main image, below the plane of the Galaxy, is a large cloud of gas in our Galaxy. The obvious arc of light surrounding it is Barnard's Loop - the expanding bubble of an exploded star. Planck has seen whole other galaxies. The great spiral galaxy in Andromeda, 2.2 million light-years from Earth, appears as a sliver of microwave light, released by the coldest dust in its giant body. Other, more distant, galaxies with supermassive black holes appear as single points of microwaves dotting the image