According to new findings from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, the first starts in the universe could have formed about 100 million years later than most scientists have previously estimated. The observations of the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) polarization now suggest that the Dark Ages might have ended some 550 million years after the Big Bang, instead of previous estimates of some 420 million years later.
The Planck satellite’s continued studies and the sky maps have resulted in several research publications in the last couple of years. The recent data will also result in new papers and add to the scientific understanding of a view of the galaxy, describing dark matter and the neutrinos.
The Planck mission is led by principal researchers Nazarene Mandolesi, Jan Tauber and Jean-Loup Puget. The new studies use the most complete surveys of the sky, combining polarization maps of the CMB at four frequencies and temperature maps at all nine frequencies observable by the satellite. The data team discovered the new insights as they put together the map of the oldest light in the observable universe.
Professor George Efstathiou, one of the Plank Science Collaboration’s leaders, explained that the time difference observed in the recent study is a proportionally large change in our understanding of when and how several cosmic events unfolded in the initial phase of the cosmos evolution. However, the difference of about 100 million years might look small while considering 14 billion years old history of the universe.
The Planck data also support the hypothesis that dark energy is acting against gravity against the belief that dark energy doesn’t exist.
The new catalog of images from the Planck observations also demonstrates more than 1,500 clusters of galaxies, making it the largest catalog of its kind. It is archived at the ESA as well as at Infrared Processing and Analysis Center of NASA at the California Institute of Technology.
Source: ESA.