Revealed: The Big Bang's baby boom

The afterglow of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background, as detected by the European Space Agency's Planck space probe. The radiation was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. (AP Photo/ESA, Planck Collaboration via NASA) Source: AP

THE Planck space telescope has captured an image of the residual glow from the Big Bang, the European Space Agency says.

This is an image with more detail than has ever been captured before of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which originated about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the explosion amid which the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.

"For cosmologists, this map is a goldmine of information," George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and one of Planck's lead researchers, said of the data.

This first light, which has been travelling through space for some 13.4 billion years and cooling the entire time, now has a temperature of just 2.7 degrees Kelvin (minus 273 C or minus 454 F), which is just above absolute zero.

Nevertheless, the light shows very tiny fluctuations in its density corresponding to the "seeds" from which stars and galaxies later formed.

An image from the Planck spacecraft shows a bridge of hot gas that connects galaxy clusters about a billion light-years from Earth. (AP Photo/ESA Planck Collaboration)

The unique photograph was obtained after processing data obtained over the past 2 1/2 years by the Planck telescope launched in May 2009 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana to map the cosmos and analyse its origins.

The telescope is positioned at a location in space known as the Earth/Sun L2 Lagrange point some 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

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