Planckearly results. I. ThePlanckmission

Abstract

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite was launched on 14 May 2009, and has been surveying the sky stably and continuously since 13 August 2009. Its performance is well in line with expectations, and it will continue to gather scientific data until the end of its cryogenic lifetime. We give an overview of the history of Planck in its first year of operations, and describe some of the key performance aspects of the satellite. This paper is part of a package submitted in conjunction with Planck's Early Release Compact Source Catalogue, the first data product based on Planck to be released publicly. The package describes the scientific performance of the Planck payload, and presents results on a variety of astrophysical topics related to the sources included in the Catalogue, as well as selected topics on diffuse emission.

Optimizing observational strategy for futurefgasconstraints

“…Of particular interest in the present context, the Planck satellite [15] is constructing the first all-sky cluster catalog since ROSAT. Thanks to its large survey volume, Planck will increase the number of hot, x-ray luminous and massive systems available for study at intermediate redshifts, beyond the ROSAT AllSky Survey limit, and out to z $ 1.…”

The Thirty Gigahertz Instrument Receiver for the QUIJOTE Experiment: Preliminary Polarization Measurements and Systematic-Error Analysis

“…Ultra-sensitive radio astronomy instruments have been used since then to characterize the CMB. Space missions like COBE [3] in the late 1980s, WMAP [4] in the early 2000s and more recently, the PLANCK mission [5,6], have been dedicated to the analysis of temperature and polarization anisotropies of the CMB. Moreover, ground-based experiments, such as QUIET [7] and BICEP [8,9], have been developed to measure the CMB polarization to increasingly higher sensitivity with the aim of measuring the B-mode polarization pattern predicted by inflationary models of the early Universe.…”

Morphology of high-multiplicity events in heavy ion collisions

“…Analysis of such maps reveal the small temperature fluctuations and anisotropies that the early Universe has left on top of an otherwise smooth and constant background. By expressing the measured signal in terms of an expansion in spherical harmonics, useful quantities such as the power spectrum, alignment between different multipoles, statistical anisotropy, and Gaussianity of the CMB can be constructed and compared with theory even from a single map (realization) of the CMB sky [21]. In the analysis of CMB data, the methods focus on the separation of the different components of the observed signal from that of the primordial CMB.…”

“…In cosmology, the CMB anisotropy is analyzed by means of two-dimensional maps that essentially cover the full sky (like those from the COBE, WMAP, and PLANCK experiments [21][22][23]), or only patches of the sky (Boomerang, MAXIMA, CBI, ACT, etc. [24][25][26][27]).…”

“…In both cases, these initial fluctuations are propagated fluid dynamically and are experimentally accessible, in the first case as fluctuations of the (photon) cosmic microwave background (CMB) [21][22][23][24][25][26][27] and, in the second case, as fluctuations and characteristic variations in the density of particles produced in very energetic heavy ion collisions [28,29]. Also, in both cases, the decoupling of the different particle species from the common fluid dynamical system provides important possibilities for experimental verification of the collective dynamics.…”