results from
COBE,
WMAP and
Planck .
Planck started its First All-Sky Survey on 13 August 2009. In September 2009, the
European Space Agency announced the preliminary results from the
Planck First Light Survey, which was performed to demonstrate the stability of the instruments and the ability to calibrate them over long periods. The results indicated that the data quality is excellent. On 15 January 2010 the mission was extended by 12 months, with observation continuing until at least the end of 2011. After the successful conclusion of the First Survey, the spacecraft started its Second All Sky Survey on 14 February 2010. The last observations for the Second All Sky Survey were made on 28 May 2010. On 5 July 2010, the
Planck mission delivered its first all-sky image. The first public scientific result of
Planck is the Early-Release Compact-Source Catalogue, released during the January 2011
Planck conference in Paris. On 5 May 2014 a map of the galaxy's magnetic field created using
Planck was published. The Planck team and
principal investigators
Nazzareno Mandolesi and
Jean-Loup Puget shared the 2018
Gruber Prize in Cosmology. Puget was also awarded the 2018
Shaw Prize in Astronomy. The 2019
Cocconi Prize of the
European Physical Society has been awarded to the Planck collaboration (jointly with the
WMAP collaboration).
2013 data release On 21 March 2013, the European-led research team behind the
Planck cosmology probe released the mission's all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background. This map suggests the Universe is slightly older than thought: according to the map, subtle fluctuations in temperature were imprinted on the deep sky when the Universe was about 370,000 years old. The imprint reflects ripples that arose as early in the existence of the Universe as the first nonillionth (10−30) of a second. It is theorised that these ripples gave rise to the present vast
cosmic web of
galactic clusters and
dark matter. The 2013 release found an asymmetry in the statistics of the CMB with respect to viewing angle in the sky, determining that "deviations from isotropy have been found and demonstrated to be robust against component separation algorithm, mask choice and frequency dependence", more commonly known as the
Axis of evil (cosmology). According to the team, the Universe is billion-years-old, and contains ordinary matter, dark matter and
dark energy. The
Hubble constant was also measured to be .
2015 data release Results from an analysis of
Planck full mission were made public on 1 December 2014 at a conference in
Ferrara, Italy. A full set of papers detailing the mission results were released in February 2015. Some of the results include: • More agreement with previous WMAP results on parameters such as the density and distribution of matter in the Universe, as well as more accurate results with less margin of error. • Confirmation of the Universe having a 26% content of dark matter. These results also raise related questions about the
positron excess over
electrons detected by the
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an experiment on the
International Space Station. Previous research suggested that positrons could be created by the collision of dark matter particles, which could only occur if the probability of dark matter collisions is significantly higher now than in the early Universe.
Planck data suggests that the probability of such collisions must remain constant over time to account for the structure of the Universe, negating the previous theory. • Validation of the simplest models of
inflation, thus giving the
Lambda-CDM model stronger support. • That there are likely only three types of
neutrinos, with a fourth proposed
sterile neutrino unlikely to exist. Project scientists worked too with
BICEP2 scientists to release joint research in 2015 answering whether a signal detected by BICEP2 was evidence of primordial
gravitational waves, or was simple
background noise from dust in the Milky Way galaxy.
2018 final data release == See also ==