Planck telescope updates cosmic microwave background map

Nature : The European Space Agency’s €600 million ($775 million) Planck telescope, launched in 2009, has provided the most detailed map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation yet. CMB radiation is made of the photons that were first allowed to travel freely when the universe cooled to the point that hydrogen and helium atoms could form. Over time those photons have cooled to temperatures of just 2.7 K. Planck‘s mapâmdash;constructed from more than 15 months of dataâmdash;is further confirmation of the inflationary universe theory, which explains the size of the universe and the structure of the material within it. The new map has also refined the Hubble constantâmdash;the rate of expansion of the universeâmdash;down to 67.3 km/s/Mpc. That makes the universe about 13.81 billion years old, slightly older than previously estimated. More than three times as sensitive as previous missions, Planck detects variations in the CMB temperature of just one millionth of a degree. It has also provided a more accurate distribution of the energy density of the universe, with dark energy reduced to 68.3% of the total, dark matter increased to 26.8%, and normal matter amounting to less than 5%. Planck‘s data also confirm an unusual asymmetry in the distribution of CMB temperature, which rules out some of the simpler models of inflation, but hints at the possibility of new physics yet to be discovered.