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From: Douglas Scott <dscott@phas.ubc.ca>
To: hilaryfeldman@yahoo.ca
Sent: Thu, January 6, 2011 9:35:36 PM
Subject: Planck press thing

Here's what we have so far.  Let me know if you have comments.
Thanks,
D.

Planck Uncovers Secrets of the Universe

A new survey of the Universe is revealing many surprising astronomical objects, including extremely cold dust clouds, galaxies with powerful nuclei, and giant clusters of galaxies. The Planck satellite is probing at microwave wavelengths – from 0.35 millimetre to 1 centimetre – and has provided the first view of the entire sky across most of its nine wavelength bands. Lower wavelengths are blocked by Earth's atmosphere. Detecting them requires a space mission, which also provides an extremely stable environment for observations. Collecting a combination of data at all wavelengths reveals exciting objects, which appear unremarkable through optical telescopes. Scientists are using these new data to learn about the coldest clumps of gas and dust where stars are forming, the properties of unusual forms of cosmic dust, huge clusters of galaxies, and how dust-filled galaxies evolve over the history of the Universe.

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with contributions from other agencies including the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The CSA supports two main Canadian research groups based at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver and the University of Toronto.  UBC Professor Douglas Scott says, "This is a huge international project, so it is fantastic that Canadians are so actively involved. These first results show that Planck is every bit as exciting as we expected!"  Planck was designed to study variations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is the oldest source of light left from when the Universe was extremely hot. From this information, cosmologists can learn about the structure and evolution of the entire cosmos. Professor Scott adds, "As well as studying the microwave background, Planck maps the "foreground" emission from our own Galaxy and all the stuff between here and the background – that's what we're learning about in these first results".

Planck launched in May 2009 and has completed an initial survey of the entire sky at nine separate wavelengths, providing a unique multi-colour survey of the Universe. This database of images and the accompanying list of identifiable objects, the Planck "Early Release Compact Source Catalogue", will be mined by astronomers for years to come.  The first results from Planck are described in a set of 25 new papers produced by the Planck collaboration, a team of scientists from over 15 countries.

The UBC team of Dr Adam Moss, Dr Jim Zibin and Andrew Walker, led by Professor Scott, has played an active role in developing software to analyze vast amounts of data. The team is also calibrating the results before they are used to create maps of the sky.

Highlights from the latest science results include:

* A new list of the coldest clumps of gas and dust within our own Galaxy. Planck's multi-colour survey allows these objects to be picked out easily.  Dense cores of dust and gas were found, with temperatures as low as just 7 degrees above absolute zero (or -266 Celsius). Now that their locations are known, follow-up studies with other telescopes will help understand how these clouds are turning into stars.

* Strong evidence for the existence of what astronomers call "anomalous" dust, i.e. an interstellar grain of material that behaves in an unexpected way, giving a different emitted light spectrum from usual thermally-emitting grains. The most likely explanation: the spectrum peaks at such short wavelengths because dust particles are spinning billions of times a second.

* Clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies discovered through their effect on the "background". This "SZ effect" (named after Russian astrophysicists Rashid Sunyaev and Yakov Zeldovich) results from scattering of the background by hot electrons in the clusters. This action is akin to putting a coloured filter onto the microwave sky, altering the spectrum in the direction of the cluster. Planck's combination of multiple wavelength bands has allowed the detection of about 200 clusters.

* The "Cosmic Infrared Background" is a glow at infrared and microwave wavelengths, coming from the total light emitted by dust across all the galaxies in the Universe. Planck allows astronomers to study the evolution of these galaxies, by comparing variations across the sky among different wavelength bands.

Contact information: (Professor Douglas Scott will be at the Paris conference associated with this press release).  The other UBC-based researchers are:

Dr. Adam Moss                Dr. James Zibin
Tel.: 604-822-2945          Tel.:
Email: adammoss@phas.ubc.ca  Email: zibin@phas.ubc.ca