CRISISBOOM

New images from the European Space Agency’s Planck mission have revealed previously undiscovered islands of star formation, along with a mysterious haze of microwave emissions in our Milky Way galaxy.

“The images reveal two exciting aspects of the galaxy in which we live,” explained Planck scientist Krzysztof M. Gorski from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Warsaw University Observatory in Poland.



”They show a haze around the center of the galaxy, and cold gas where we never saw it before.”

To be sure, the new images depict the entire sky, which is dominated by the murky band of our Milky Way galaxy.

One of them shows the unexplained haze of microwave light – which was previously hinted at in measurements by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

“The haze [originates] from the region surrounding the center of our galaxy and looks like Read more…