First Cosmology Results from Planck Jamie Bock, Professor of Physics, Caltech

The Planck satellite, launched by the European Space Agency in 2009 with NASA-contributed technologies, is rendering the most sensitive all-sky measurements of cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization anisotropy. The Planck collaboration recently released first cosmology results derived from the first two surveys, covering the sky with high sensitivity in 9 spectral bands from 30 – 857 GHz and with angular resolution from 5 – 30 arcmin. I will discuss the on-orbit performance of Planck and scientific results from the first cosmology release, including new measurements of CMB temperature anisotropy, CMB lensing, the cosmic infrared background, an all-sky catalog of Sunyaev-Zel'Dovich clusters, and Galactic extended emission. Planck is still collecting data and subsequent releases are planned based on the full survey including polarization results in 2014 and 2015.