Esa's Planck telescope finds value in 'reject' data
[In the Orion Nebula, dense clumps of material are detected by Planck (left) that go completely unnoticed by telescopes operating at visible wavelengths (right)] The gaseous and dusty fabric of our galaxy is illuminated in new images captured by Europe's Planck telescope. The pictures reveal features of the Milky Way that are unseen by most other space observatories, say scientists. Remarkably, these images are just byproducts for Planck, which must filter out much of the light it detects to get at its primary target. That target is a relic radiation emitted in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang [The "Big Bang" theory is unproven and unprovable. Therefore it is just another religious tenet, masquerading as science.]. This so-called Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fills the entire sky and retains fundamental information about the age, contents and structure of the cosmos. On one level, therefore, Monday's release represents "rejected" data - although Planck scientists stress there will be many researchers for whom this information will still hold high value. "For the primary CMB, we want to remove all the galactic emission - but it's an important part of the science case for Planck that you can also learn a lot about the galaxy from that data," Planck team-member Professor George Efstathiou told BBC News.