Planck represents the third generation of attempts to map the cosmic microwave background.
In the case of the microwave background, that object is the universe itself.
It is these photons, now massively red-shifted, that form the cosmic microwave background.
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At the risk of oversimplifying, this is the lack of noticeably non-random fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background spectrum measured by Planck.
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Besides being frozen into the microwave background, the effects of the primordial cacophony should have been frozen into the structure of the universe.
They have produced highly accurate maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, which has its origins in the very early stages of the Universe.
Clusters like El Gordo release energetic particles that have an effect on the cosmic microwave background, the extremely faint glow left over from the Big Bang that permeates the Universe.
This new photogenic moment, released Thursday, comes courtesy of the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, which detects cosmic microwave background radiation -- the light left over from the Big Bang.
And the new generation has the backing of an old hand - Professor George Smoot, Nobel prizewinner for his work on the cosmic microwave background and one of the world's most respected physicists.
In February, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (Wmap) satellite took the most detailed picture yet of the cosmic microwave background - an image of the infant cosmos when it was less than 400, 000 years old.
Because the early universe is believed to have undergone a period of rapid inflation, features that were Planck-scale may have been magnified to the point where they are visible as blips in the cosmic microwave background, an electromagnetic echo of the Big Bang.
The new map is a smart byproduct of the European Space Agency (Esa) telescope's main mission which is to survey the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB - a pervasive but faint glow of long-wavelength radiation that comes to us from the very edge of the observable Universe.
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In 1966 Kenneth Greisen, Vadim Kuzmin and Georgiy Zatsepin showed that high-energy charged particles (cosmic rays are mostly atomic nuclei, and thus positively charged) should be slowed by collisions with the photons of the cosmic microwave background (radiation left over from the Big Bang that permeates all space).
And that geometrical prediction was confirmed directly by the Sloan survey, using the known distances of 500m light years to the density peak and 13 billion light years to the region where the microwave background originates as reference points to look for geometrical distortion, in the way that a more traditional land survey might use triangulation points.
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