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The HFI team is led by Professor J. Richard Bond of the University of Toronto. The Canadian teams have spent more than a decade working with their international colleagues to plan for the Planck mission, and will be directly involved in using the data to answer some of the biggest questions in the Universe.
An unambiguous detection of the Galactic Haze – a mysterious, diffuse emission from the central portion of the Milky Way – and the first all-sky map of carbon monoxide, whose emission traces the molecular clouds where stars are born, are among the results being presented by the Planck Collaboration at an international conference held from 13 to 17 February 2012, in Bologna, Italy. These results have been achieved during the complex task of identifying and removing the foreground contamination due to Galactic and extragalactic emission that obscures the Cosmic Microwave Background.
The primary goal of ESA's Planck satellite is to observe the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and to measure its tiny fluctuations across the sky with unprecedented accuracy. These variations contain all-important information about the constituents of the Universe and the origin of cosmic structure. Along with the CMB, Planck also sees almost every bright source that shone throughout cosmic history. This includes emission from individual galaxies and, most notably, from the interstellar medium (ISM) in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. Diffuse emission from this mixture of gas and dust represents the dominant source of foreground contamination to the CMB at all frequencies of interest across the entire plane of our Galaxy.
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Published: February 17, 2012
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