Facts about Planck Space Telescope

1. 07

   Dust emissions across the entire sky were mapped by Planck at wavelengths between 350 and 850 micrometers, revealing the distribution of cold interstellar dust throughout our galaxy.

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2. 06

   Planck's observations revealed that the universe is 13.82 billion years old, slightly older than previous estimates from the WMAP satellite.

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3. 05

   Planck's primary mirror, composed of 74 hexagonal beryllium tiles coated with gold, measured 1.9 meters across and collected microwave radiation across the entire celestial sphere.

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4. 04

   At 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the Planck Space Telescope orbited the second Lagrange point where gravitational forces balanced its orbital motion.

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5. 03

   The Planck Space Telescope's instruments operated at temperatures below 0.1 Kelvin, colder than the deepest reaches of outer space itself.

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6. 02

   Thirty-one months of observations by the Planck Space Telescope detected over 1,600 new galaxy clusters through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect.

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7. 01

   Launched in May 2009, the Planck Space Telescope mapped the cosmic microwave background with unprecedented precision across 9 frequency bands.

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