The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched 14 May 2009 and has been scanning the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously since 12 August 2009. In March 2013, ESA and the Planck Collaboration released the initial cosmology products based on the first 15.5 months of Planck data, along with a set of scientific and technical papers and a web-based explanatory supplement. This paper gives an overview of the mission and its performance, the processing, analysis, and characteristics of the data, the scientific results, and the science data products and papers in the release. The science products include maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and diffuse extragalactic foregrounds, a catalogue of compact Galactic and extragalactic sources, and a list of sources detected through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. The likelihood code used to assess cosmological models against the Planck data and a lensing likelihood are described. Scientific results include robust support for the standard six-parameter ΛCDM model of cosmology and improved measurements of its parameters, including a highly significant deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum. The Planck values for these parameters and others derived from them are significantly different from those previously determined. Several large-scale anomalies in the temperature distribution of the CMB, first detected by WMAP, are confirmed with higher confidence. Planck sets new limits on the number and mass of neutrinos, and has measured gravitational lensing of CMB anisotropies at greater than 25σ. Planck finds no evidence for non-Gaussianity in the CMB. Planck's results agree well with results from the measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations. Planck finds a lower Hubble constant than found in some more local measures. Some tension is also present between the amplitude of matter fluctuations (σ 8 ) derived from CMB data and that derived from Sunyaev-Zeldovich data. The Planck and WMAP power spectra are offset from each other by an average level of about 2% around the first acoustic peak. Analysis of Planck polarization data is not yet mature, therefore polarization results are not released, although the robust detection of E-mode polarization around CMB hot and cold spots is shown graphically.

Planck data have been used to provide stringent new constraints on cosmic strings and other defects. We describe forecasts of the CMB power spectrum induced by cosmic strings, calculating these from network models and simulations using line-of-sight Boltzmann solvers. We have studied Nambu-Goto cosmic strings, as well as field theory strings for which radiative effects are important, thus spanning the range of theoretical uncertainty in the underlying strings models. We have added the angular power spectrum from strings to that for a simple adiabatic model, with the extra fraction defined as f 10 at multipole = 10. This parameter has been added to the standard six parameter fit using COSMOMC with flat priors. For the Nambu-Goto string model, we have obtained a constraint on the string tension of Gµ/c 2 < 1.5 × 10 −7 and f 10 < 0.015 at 95% confidence that can be improved to Gµ/c 2 < 1.3 × 10 −7 and f 10 < 0.010 on inclusion of high-CMB data. For the Abelian-Higgs field theory model we find, Gµ AH /c 2 < 3.2 × 10 −7 and f 10 < 0.028. The marginalised likelihoods for f 10 and in the f 10 -Ω b h 2 plane are also presented. We have additionally obtained comparable constraints on f 10 for models with semilocal strings and global textures. In terms of the effective defect energy scale these are somewhat weaker at Gµ/c 2 < 1.1 × 10 −6 . We have made complementarity searches for the specific non-Gaussian signatures of cosmic strings, calibrating with all-sky Planck resolution CMB maps generated from networks of post-recombination strings. We have validated our non-Gaussian searches using these simulated maps in a Planck-realistic context, estimating sensitivities of up to ∆Gµ/c 2 ≈ 4 × 10 −7 . We have obtained upper limits on the string tension at 95% confidence of Gµ/c 2 < 9.0 × 10 −7 with modal bispectrum estimation and Gµ/c 2 < 7.8 × 10 −7 for real space searches with Minkowski functionals. These are conservative upper bounds because only post-recombination string contributions have been included in the non-Gaussian analysis.

We report the experimental discovery of "electrorheological (ER) complex plasmas," where the control of the interparticle interaction by an externally applied electric field is due to distortion of the Debye spheres that surround microparticles (dust) in a plasma. We show that interactions in ER plasmas under weak ac fields are mathematically equivalent to those in conventional ER fluids. Microgravity experiments, as well as molecular dynamics simulations, show a phase transition from an isotropic to an anisotropic (string) plasma state as the electric field is increased.

The dynamical onset of lane formation is studied in experiments with binary complex plasmas under microgravity conditions. Small microparticles are driven and penetrate into a cloud of big particles, revealing a strong tendency towards lane formation. The observed time-resolved lane-formation process is in good agreement with computer simulations of a binary Yukawa model with Langevin dynamics. The laning is quantified in terms of the anisotropic scaling index, leading to a universal order parameter for driven systems.

PKS 0558-504 is a highly variable, X-ray bright, radio-loud, Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 galaxy with super-Eddington accretion rate and extended jets that do not dominate the emission beyond the radio band. Therefore, this source represents an ideal laboratory to shed some light on the central engine in highly accreting systems and specifically on the link between accretion disc and corona. Here we present the results from a 1.5 year monitoring with SWIFT XRT and UVOT. The simultaneous coverage at several wavelengths confirms that PKS 0558-504 is highly variable in any band from optical, to UV and X-rays, with the latter showing the largest amplitude changes but with the UV emission dominating the radiative output. A cross-correlation analysis reveals a tight link between the emission in the optical and UV bands and provides suggestive evidence in favor of a scenario where the variability originates in the outer part of the accretion flow and propagates inwards before triggering the activity of the X-ray emitting corona. Finally, a positive correlation between the soft X-ray flux and the hard photon index suggests that in PKS 0558-504 the seed photons are provided to the corona by the soft excess component.

No abstract

We present a model-independent method to test for scale-dependent non-Gaussianities in combination with scaling indices as test statistics. Therefore, surrogate data sets are generated, in which the power spectrum of the original data is preserved, while the higher order correlations are partly randomized by applying a scale-dependent shuffling procedure to the Fourier phases. We apply this method to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data of the cosmic microwave background and find signatures for non-Gaussianities on large scales. Further tests are required to elucidate the origin of the detected anomalies.

We continue the analysis of non‐Gaussianities in the cosmic microwave background by means of the scaling index method by applying this method on the single Q, V, W bands and the co‐added VW band of the five‐year data of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. We compare each of the results with 1000 Monte Carlo simulations mimicking the Gaussian properties of the best fitting Λ cold dark matter model. Based on the scaling indices, scale‐dependent empirical probability distributions, moments of these distributions and χ2 combinations of them are calculated, obtaining similar results as in the former analysis of the three‐year data: we derive evidence for non‐Gaussianity with a probability of up to 97.3 per cent for the mean when regarding the KQ75‐masked full sky and summing up over all considered length‐scales by means of a diagonal χ2 statistics. Looking at only the northern or southern hemisphere of the galactic coordinate system, we obtain up to 98.5 or 96.6 per cent, respectively. For the standard deviation, these results appear as 95.6 per cent for the full sky (99.7 per cent north, 89.4 per cent south) and for a χ2 combination of both measurements as 97.4 per cent (99.1 per cent north, 95.5 per cent south). We obtain larger deviations from Gaussianity when looking at separate scale lengths. By performing an analysis of rotated hemispheres, we detect an obvious asymmetry in the data. In addition to these investigations, we present a method of filling the mask with Gaussian noise to eliminate boundary effects caused by the mask. With the help of this technique, we identify several local features on the map, of which the most significant one turns out to be the well‐known cold spot. When excluding all these spots from the analysis, the deviation from Gaussianity increases, which shows that the discovered local anomalies are not the reason of the global detection of non‐Gaussianity, but actually were damping the deviations on average. Our analyses per band and per year suggest, however, that it is very unlikely that the detected anomalies are due to foreground effects.