An overview of data and results from the Planck mission

Date

Dec 10, 2013

Time

4:40 PM - 6:10 PM

Speaker

Dr. Jan Tauber

Affiliation

European Space Agency, Astrophysics Division

Series

TUD Physikalisches Kolloquium

Language

en

Main Topic

Physik

Other Topics

Physik

Host

Prof. Dr. Carsten Timm

Description

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, dedicated to studying the early universe and its subsequent evolution,  was launched on 14 May 2009 and has been surveying the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously since August 2009. In March 2013, ESA and the Planck Collaboration publicly released the initial cosmology products based on the first 15.5 months of Planck operations, along with a set of scientific and technical papers and a web-based explanatory supplement.  In this talk, I will describe the mission and its performance, and give an overview of the main Planck data products and scientific results. The science products include a set of specialized maps of the cosmic microwave background, maps of Galactic and extragalactic extended foregrounds, a catalogue of compact Galactic and extragalactic sources, and a list of sources detected through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. Scientific results include robust support for the standard, six-parameter LCDM model of cosmology and improved measurements for the parameters that define this model, including a highly significant deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum. The Planck values for some of these parameters and others derived from them are significantly different from those previously determined. Several large scale anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background's temperature distribution detected earlier by WMAP are confirmed with higher confidence. Planck sets new limits on the number and mass of neutrinos, and has measured gravitational lensing of CMB anisotropies at greater than 25 σ. Planck finds no evidence for non-Gaussian statistics of the CMB anisotropies. Because the analysis of Planck polarization data is not yet as mature as the analysis of temperature data, polarization results are not released.  I will, however, illustrate the robust detection of the E-mode polarization signal around CMB hot- and cold-spots.

Last modified: Nov 26, 2013, 3:19:43 PM