"So far Einstein is looking pretty good," said Martin White, a U.S. Planck team member from University of California, Berkeley. "The dark energy hypothesis is holding up very well, but this is not the end of the story."

Hot gas, dust and magnetic fields mingle in a colorful swirl in this new map of our Milky Way galaxy. The image is part of a new and improved data set from Planck, a European Space Agency mission in which NASA played a key role.

Planck spent more than four years observing relic radiation left over from the birth of our universe, called the cosmic microwave background. The space telescope is helping scientists better understand the history and fabric of our universe, as well as our own Milky Way.



http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/planck-mission-explores-the-history-of-our-universe/index.html#.VNVJ7C72NOZ

Resources:

An interactive Web viewer for the images is online at:

http://planck.ipac.caltech.edu/wwt/

A narrated video explaining how Planck studies the entire history of our universe is online at:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1205

More information is online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/planck

http://www.esa.int/planck

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