Planck Surveyor reveals 15,000 new celestial objects

In its first year in operation, the ''Planck Surveyor'' satellite has achieved impressive results: a catalogue with 15,000 celestial objects such as galaxy clusters, quasars, radio galaxies, nearby galaxies and galactic dust clouds, 25 scientific papers, as well as the most precise measurement of the far infrared background to date, which reveals star formation in the early universe.

The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics developed important software components for Planck and is heavily involved in the scientific interpretation of the mission data.

The 15 000 objects in the ''Early Release Compact Source Catalogue'', where galactic objects – mainly compact dust clouds – are shown in green, and extragalactic objects – mainly radio galaxies and galaxies with a large thermal emission from dust – are shown in yellow. The larger yellow blob to the lower right is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.

So far, Planck has produced three complete scans of the whole sky, thus fulfilling its primary objective. However, as it continues to function perfectly, the satellite will probably stay in operation until the start of 2012 and continue to provide data. The results gained from the first year of Planck data were first presented on 11 January 2011, where many of these results are based on the ''Early Release Compact Source Catalogue'' with some 15 000 new celestial objects. The early release of this data enables scientists to arrange for detailed follow-up observations with other telescopes such as the Herschel space telescope with operates at similar wavelengths.

At the same time as the catalogue, 25 scientific papers are published with topics covering many orders of magnitude and objects and ranging from studies of individual objects in the catalogue and analyses of galactic emission to the first cosmological results on galaxy clusters and the light of early galaxies.

Highlights of these papers include: