Planck Deep Space Telescope Retired

 

Launched in 2009 and instrumental in determining the true age of the universe, which was 80 million years older that scientists had estimated,  the Planck telescope is being retired.  

Planck  spent all of it's working life in deep space behind a super cooled detector, which, along with it's sister scope the Herschel Space Observatory, its primary function was to study some of the most ancient photons thought to have been created at the time of the big bang.  

Herschel went offline in April of this year, but Planck continued on until its supply of liquid helium coolant expired, at which time the scientists operating Planck agreed that the scope had reached the end of its operational life.  

Planck will now be moved into a parking orbit around the sun.    The the final deactivation command was sent to Planck on 23 October 2013.

To read more:  Gizmodo  and The Wikipedia

Is the Universe a Giant Hologram?

Well here is something to twist your head sideways. From NewScientist is an article that describes some startling conclusions about the makeup of space/time from scientists involved with the GEO600 experiment. This experiment, for the last 7 years, has been looking for gravitational waves, ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes, but has been unsuccessful. But now, here is where it gets weird.... you see for quite a while, the scientists running the GEO600 experiment have been inexplicably plagued by noise. This noise, according to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab comes from the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the universe Einstein described and instead dissolves into something akin to pixels.

Hogan said:

• "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

As absurd as this sounds, it has gone a long way towards helping scientists studying super massive objects like black holes answer some pretty vexing questions of how the universe works on its most fundamental levels.

The article over on New Scientist really goes into great detail and is an excellent read, you really should go Here to read more. Worth your time for sure.

To See Before Time

Seeing before time sounds like a poetic fancy or the end of a bad SF story in which God's hand is seen creating the universe, but an upcoming ESA satellite, Planck, may allow scientists to do just that, in a manner of speaking.

A recent challenge for scientists has been that fact that the universe seems to have larger "fluctuations in the density and temperature of the radiation left over from the theoretical Big Bang" on one side of the universe. Clara Moskowitz notes on MSNBC.com that Planck, launching this year, should be able to determine if the universe's lopsidedness is real or merely an artifact of less sensative data collection.

The standard model of Inflation cannot account for this perceived variation but a recently published model by Caltech astrophysicists Sean Carroll and Marc Kamionkowski and graduate student Adrienne Erickcek theorizes that two separate fields are necessary for inflation to account for this.

If the universe's unevenness is real then the new model will provide not only an explanation for current conditions but also a small window into pre-Big Bang conditions, effectively seeing before the begining of time (the Big Bang).