Astrophysics of Interstellar Matter
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9 years 9 months ago
Many new and enigmatic high redshift galaxies that are intensively forming stars have been discovered using ESA’s Planck and Herschel satellites . These galaxies occur in clumps – and could be the long-sought formation phase of galaxy clusters. Some appear very bright, and have been found to be gravitationally lensed galaxies. These rapidly star-forming galaxies could help solve a central problem in cosmology: how did the large scale structure of galaxies form?
9 years 11 months ago
News about Dark Matter, neutrinos, first stars and the cosmological model: the Planck collaboration, with a leading participation of the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, has just published nearly twenty articles revealing many important results that will allow to better understand major chapters in the book of the Universe.
9 years 11 months ago
By analysing their data jointly, the Planck and BICEP2/Keck collaborations have shown that the detection of primordial gravitational waves through the observation of the polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has not occurred yet. This result constitutes the denouement of the scientific drama that kept enthralled cosmologists and universe enthusiasts alike since March 2014: the signal, the detection of which has been reported by the BICEP2 team, is not related to the first instants of the Big Bang. It results from the combination of the Galactic signal and of gravitational distortions of the CMB during its propagation down to us.
10 years 1 month ago
Beginning the 1st December at an international conference in Ferrara (Italy), the Planck collaboration, which involves the CNRS, the CEA, the CNES and several French universities among other institutes, reveals the results of four years of observation by the ESA Planck satellite of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe. For the first time, the CMB is accurately measured on the whole sky in both its intensity and polarisation.
10 years 3 months ago
The Planck consortium has published a statistical analysis of the dust polarization towards the regions of the sky best suited to measure Cosmic Microwave Background polarization. This work shows that dust polarization is significant over all of the sky, and that the signature of cosmic inflation will not be detected unless contamination associated with the dusty and magnetized interstellar medium in the Galaxy is removed with the required accuracy and confidence.