Gaia space observatory

Gaia is a space observatory to be launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) on 20 November 2013. The mission aims to compile a 3D space catalogue of approximately 1 billion astronomical objects.

 

Planck's view of the Universe

This animation highlights some of the many discoveries made by ESA's Planck space telescope over its 4.5 year observing career, from new discoveries in our home Milky Way Galaxy stretching back to the first few moments after the Big Bang 13.82 billion years ago.

 

ESA Euronews: Planck, Higgs and the Big Bang

When it comes to the origins of the Universe, there's one idea that really captures our imagination: everything, even time itself, started with the Big Bang.

The concept of the Big Bang is difficult to describe and problematic to measure, however that's exactly what two major projects have set out to do: one on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the other in space, ESA's Planck mission.

In this edition of Space, Euronews gets to the heart of the matter and attempts to discover how matter and everything in the Universe came into being. We speak with experts from the CERN, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, Sorbonne University and ESA, all studying how the Universe works.

 

Planck maps the dawn of time

Scientists have traced a unique new map of the first light of the universe, and raised profound questions about the Big Bang.The image of the cosmic microwave background they have released was taken by ESA's Planck satellite, and its results could have a significant impact on the field of cosmology.


Acquired by ESA's Planck space telescope, the most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background -- the relic radiation from the Big Bang -- was released this year, revealing the existence of features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe.



The following animation explains how the wealth of information that is contained in the all-sky map of temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) can be condensed into a curve known as the power spectrum.

The temperature of the CMB exhibits fluctuations on a variety of angular scales on the sky. The animation shows six different maps that depict the relative 'power', or strength, of the fluctuations at different angular scales. The maps correspond to different regions of the curve, starting at angles of ninety degrees on the left side of the graph, through to the smallest scales -- just a fraction of a degree -- on the right hand side.
By studying the peaks in the power spectrum curve, cosmologists can extract information regarding the ingredients of the Universe, such as ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy, and the overall geometry of the Universe.

Credits: ESA and the Planck Collaboration