The Planck mission has yielded the most detailed map yet of the cosmic microwave background radiation, from which crucial cosmological parameters have been recalculated.
At a March 21 NASA telephone news conference, scientists from the U.S. team participating in the European Space Agency's Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) discussed Planck's first cosmological results, including some surprising news. For one thing, the universe is 13.82 billion years old, a hundred million years older than previously thought, because it's expanding more slowly. Even more surprising is that the universe contains significantly less dark energy and significantly more matter - both dark and ordinary - than indicated by the prior CMB surveyor, NASA's WMAP satellite. According to Planck's results, dark energy accounts for only 68.3 percent of the mass-energy of the universe, down from WMAP's 71.4 percent, while dark matter is up 26.8 percent from WMAP's 24. And while the ordinary stuff you and I are made of and can see or touch is still a small part of the whole, at least we've climbed back up to 4.9 percent (pretty close to one-twentieth, eh?) from the miserable 4.6 percent we could claim until recently. Planck's initial results are based on its first 15 and a half months of repeated observations of a billion points in the whole sky, adding up to trillions of observations of faint variations in the temperature of the CMB. The CMB is primordial light freed when the early universe cooled enough for photons and particles of matter to disentangle themselves and go their separate ways; the temperature variations themselves are evidence of pressure waves that moved through the universe when it was still in a quasi-liquid state.
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