Planck studies the CMB (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 19, 2013, 00:53 (3993 days ago)

Close to the standard model, still:-"A new analysis of data on the infant universe released earlier this year indicates that the initial findings are more in line with the standard cosmological picture than had originally been thought.-"There were both celebrations and surprises last March when the science team of the European Space Agency's Planck mission unveiled a new map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the radiation left over from the Big Bang. The precision data formed the highest-resolution all-sky CMB map ever. And it revealed a higher density of matter, a slightly greater variation in the distribution of that matter, and a lower value of the Hubble constant — a measure of the Universe's expansion rate — than a host of previous studies from the ground and space had indicated."-http://www.nature.com/news/cosmologists-at-odds-over-mysterious-anomalies-in-data-from-early-universe-1.14368