Planck Reveals Giant Dust Structures in our Local Neighborhood

By Nancy Atkinson - March 17, 2010 at 5:21 AM UTC | Milky Way

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="This new image from Planck spans about 50° of the sky. Credits: ESA/HFI Consortium/IRAS"][/caption]

Dust has never looked so beautiful! This new image from the Planck spacecraft shows giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our galaxy. The image spans about 50 degrees of the sky, showing our local neighborhood within approximately 500 light-years of the Sun. "What makes these structures have these particular shapes is not well understood," says Jan Tauber, ESA Project Scientist for Planck. Analyzing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our galaxy and trigger star formation.

What do these filamentary structures of dust represent? The denser parts are called molecular clouds while the more diffuse parts are 'cirrus,' and they do look like the wispy cirrus clouds we have on Earth. The local filaments are connected to the Milky Way, which is the pink horizontal feature near the bottom of the image. Here, the emission is coming from much further away, across the disc of our Galaxy. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="541" caption="The red box shows the region of sky seen in the new Planck image; it covers a portion of the sky about 55°. The background image is a globe representing half the sky as imaged by the IRAS satellite at 100 micrometres. Credits: ESA/IRAS"]

[/caption] The image has been color coded to discern different temperatures of dust. White-pink tones show dust of a few tens of degrees above absolute zero, whereas the deeper colors are dust at around –261°C, only about 12 degrees above absolute zero. The warmer dust is concentrated into the plane of the Galaxy whereas the dust suspended above and below is cooler.

Planck will help us study the biggest mysteries of cosmology, such as how the Universe and galaxies formed. This new image extends the range of its investigations into the cold dust structures of our own Galaxy.

Source:

ESA

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com