Posted on behalf of Geoff Brumfiel

The European Space Agency (ESA) has unveiled the Planck telescope’s first complete image of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

The CMB (the mottled backdrop pictured above and below the main disc of our Galaxy) is a ubiquitous glow produced by photons created at the formation of the Universe around 13.7 billion years ago.

Launched by ESA in 2009, the Planck satellite is the latest in a series of spacecraft designed to map tiny fluctuations in the temperature of these photons. The all-sky picture was completed over the course of around nine months, and should further astronomers’ understanding of the structure and composition of the Universe (for more on this, see Nature’s feature, Cosmology: The test of inflation).

Planck will eventually create an image of the CMB with an angular resolution three times than that created by the WMAP probe. But the image released today has had its resolution deliberately downgraded, because ESA scientists are still analysing information in the underlying high-resolution image, says Jan Tauber, who works on ESA’s Planck project.

Bad Astronomy has more on this image, and also points readers to Chromoscope, a tool that allows you to see the universe in different wavelengths of light, from radio and microwave (as above) through visible up to x-ray and gamma ray.

Credit: ESA, HFI & LFI consortia