The primary goal of the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite is to provide a map of the cosmic microwave background with unprecedented precision. But along the way, you have to take into account that there is stuff in between us and the farthest edges of the universe — in particular, there’s all sorts of dust here in our home galaxy. You can even become famous just studying dust; one of the most highly cited papers in all of astrophysics is a 1997 map of galactic dust.
Dust isn’t only an annoyance — it’s also pretty. Planck hasn’t released any data about the CMB yet, but they just released a map of the cold dust in our local vicinity, looking for all the world like an abstract expressionist painting. (I want to suggest a particular artist, but my mind is blanking.) Click to embiggen.
It’s a false-color image, of course; the dust is very cold (tens of degrees above absolute zero), and the image is constructed from microwaves, not from visible light. You can see the plane of the galaxy, and the filamentary structures arising from all the churning of the interstellar medium from supernovae, star formation, magnetic fields, and so on.
Okay, pretty time is over. Let’s see the CMB.
March 17th, 2010 at 8:33 am
Looks like a Turner to me. Not an expressionist, of course.
March 17th, 2010 at 8:38 am
I think you’re right, that’s a better association. Can almost see the ships in the background.
March 17th, 2010 at 9:04 am
Any particular areas of interest besides CMB backgrounds that this data might inform? Galactic evolution and dynamics? Stellar evolution? More local maps of dark matter, maybe? Etc.?
March 17th, 2010 at 9:13 am
Haaaaaa-Chooo!
I see horsies!
Ride of the Valkyrie.
March 17th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Looks like Hell to me. My link didn’t work, but a google image seach for Hello Kitty Hell yields a hilarious image that would look great superimposed on this.
March 17th, 2010 at 9:49 am
I’m really glad they decided to release one of these images
When I first saw these a little while ago, I thought they were truly exceptional. I believe it was Stewart Lowe who compiled the images, with the basic idea being, “If the human eye could see three microwave frequencies, instead of red, green and blue, what would it look like?” These images are the result, and it is simply stunning, at least in my opinion.
March 17th, 2010 at 10:20 am
Jason, unfortunately I can’t take credit for this one
March 17th, 2010 at 10:24 am
Ah, sorry Stuart. Sorry I got your name wrong too
March 17th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Hi
I have a beginners question. The current standard model of cosmology more or less fits all the observed properties of lensing, cmb, supernova etc correctly right? However, have it made any predictions that later has been verified by experiement? Or is it only to be viewed as a best fit candidate?
cheers, Per
March 17th, 2010 at 11:24 am
oh sean, you do such a good job of sounding like a cosmologist — making it sound like dust is either annoying or pretty, but not in the “scientifically interesting” category….
while SFD97 is highly cited because it is super, super useful, there are loads of papers about dust itself… and you can’t understand star or planet formation without understanding it!
March 17th, 2010 at 11:34 am
I was wondering when someone would complain that I wasn’t giving dust its due. Don’t worry, I do appreciate that the interstellar medium is interesting in its own right! My Ph.D. advisor did work on it for much of his life, after all.
per, the standard model has made lots of predictions that later came true, starting with primordial nucleosynthesis and the CMB itself. If you mean more particularly the ideas of dark matter and dark energy, the answer is still yes — they made predictions about the CMB, growth of structure, baryon acoustic oscillations, etc.
March 17th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
We are highly processed dust, as is the planet we live on, so don’t bag it. That picture isn’t just pretty, it is a distant family photo.
March 17th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Via NoJoy, here is Hello Kitty, in Hell, as portrayed by interstellar dust.
March 17th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
per,
Inflation should lead to a flat universe. At the time the theory of inflation was introduced (1980 or so) we had no idea whether this condition of flatness would hold, but our latest data suggests that it does. Flatness is a “just so” condition, requiring very tight bounds on the parameters, and so seems (to me) unlikely to have occurred by coincidence.
March 17th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
It should be noted that of the three wavelengths that went into this image, two came from Planck (540um and 350um) and the third from IRAS (100um), a satellite which mapped the sky in the early 1980s. The IRAS contribution alone can be seen in this image.
March 18th, 2010 at 10:17 am
It is worth clicking on the IRAS image, because it gives a good indication of the size of the area that is covered.
March 18th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
Oh c’mon, it’s clearly a Pollock. I can see where he dripped the paint!
March 20th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Remarkably similar:
This Turner
http://www.ricci-art.net/img008/156.jpg
March 20th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
perhaps Gerhard Richter or Sigmar Polke
March 21st, 2010 at 5:12 am
Low Math @3:
In addition to Sarah’s points at 10, dust is a pretty good tracer for the gas whence comes the diffuse gamma ray emission seen by, for example, Fermi. The better understanding we have of that diffuse background, the more we can learn about the rest of the stuff in the galaxy. Not that the diffuse emission isn’t interesting on its own.
March 23rd, 2010 at 3:11 am
Those of us who actually cite the Schlegel et al. dust paper Sean refers to know it’s from 1998, not 1997 …
March 27th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Dear Sean,
first of all, beautiful picture of the galaxy’s dust. However, beautiful as it is, does all of this dust not bode well for Planck’s prospects for seeing a clear view of the CMB fluctuations?
March 28th, 2010 at 9:04 am
Dust is an important foreground that must be taken into consideration when observing the CMB, no doubt. The good news is that dust affects different wavelengths in different ways, so to a large extent it can be removed (that’s a major purpose of maps like these). But often when people analyze the CMB sky they simply remove the regions where dust is too severe.
April 26th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
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