Planck satellite scientists release picture of early universe

The European Space Agency’s Planck Surveyor satellite released a map last week that traces the sky’s “oldest light.” 

The Planck has been looking for signs of leftover matter from the Big Bang, and some scientists say these recent findings confirm the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe.

Brian Greene, theoretical physicist and string theorist at Columbia University, says the scientists working on the project have been looking for heat leftover from the Big Bang called cosmic microwave background radiation.

“[Scientists] now have taken the most precise measurements ever of events that happened about 13.8 billion years ago. So it’s an amazing achievement that these astrophysicists, these scientists have been able to reach,” he says.

These findings are important to explain current theories about the Big Bang, Greene says.

“You look around the universe and you see that there are planets, stars, and galaxies. They’re all these clumps of matter… well, there had to be littler clumps early on that were the seeds of all the structure that we see today,” he says. “We believe that the seeds came from …little quantum fluctuations in the earliest moments in the universe that got imprinted on the cosmos and over time they grew into the structures that we now see.”

Scientists at the Planck project have been measuring these imprints in the early universe, Greene says, to see if the theoretical understanding of what happened during the Big Bang can explain the formation of galaxies today.

The way quantum fluctuations were imprinted onto our galaxy in the early years could be very different from how quantum mechanics manifested themselves in other universes, Greene says. 

Through this research, scientists hope to go back in time to the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang to find out what the universe was like, Greene says.

“We do have a reasonable theory of what happened back then. It’s called inflationary cosmology and it makes predictions for what the Plank satellite should have seen if the theory is correct,” he says.

And so far, Greene says, the Planck Surveyor map have matched ESA’s predictions and mathematical calculations.