Planck: Post-Big-Bang 'Baby Picture' Shows Universe is Slightly Older

A post-big-bang "baby picture," if you will, suggests that our universe is slightly older than scientists thought.

According to NBC News, a team of scientists that went behind the Planck cosmology probe on Thursday also released the mission's first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background. This map traces subtle fluctuations in temperatures that were imprinted on the sky when it was just a baby-or, rather, 380,000 years old. Some scientists believe this ripple has given rise to today's galaxy clusters and dark matter.

"To a cosmologist, this map is a gold mine of information," University of Cambridge astrophysicist George Efstathiou, a member of the Planck science team, said during a European Space Agency news conference in Paris. He joked that not long ago, cosmologists might have "given up their children" to have such a map in their hands.

The $900 million Planck probe was launched on a European Ariane 5 rocket in 2009, along with the infrared-sensitive Herschel space telescope. Planck produced its first all-sky radiation map in 2010. Since then, scientists have fine-tuned the image to remove the bright emissions from the Milky Way and other foreground sources, leaving only the background radiation.

Two NASA satellites - the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, also known as COBE and WMAP - produced earlier versions of the baby picture. Those findings determined that the universe is made up of 4.5 percent ordinary matter, 22.7 percent dark matter, and 72.8 percent dark energy. The results also showed that the universe is geometrically "flat" to a margin of error of 0.4 percent, and helped scientists estimate the universe's age at 13.7 billion years.