The space telescope is just about to be decommissioned

Oct 21, 2013 22:11 GMT  ·  By
The Shapley Supercluster - microwave light from the gas between galaxies is blue, X-Ray light from the galaxies themselves is pink; the rest is visible light imagery from the Digitised Sky Survey
   The Shapley Supercluster - microwave light from the gas between galaxies is blue, X-Ray light from the galaxies themselves is pink; the rest is visible light imagery from the Digitised Sky Survey

The Planck Space Telescope is on its way out, it will be decommissioned in two days. But that doesn't mean it's done providing great data for science. Planck has been surveying the sky looking at the primordial light of the universe, the first photons that were freed after the universe became transparent.

That light, initially highly energetic, is now only visible in the microwave spectrum. But Planck hasn't just been looking at this initial light, it's also been observing how the universe as a whole looks in microwave light.

This made it possible to spot some of the largest formations in the local universe, huge superclusters of thousands of galaxies.

The European Space Agency has published an image of the Shapley Supercluster created with Planck data along with X-Ray images captured by the Rosat satellite.

"The supercluster was discovered in the 1930s by American astronomer Harlow Shapley, as a remarkable concentration of galaxies in the Centaurus constellation," ESA explained.

"Boasting more than 8000 galaxies and with a total mass more than ten million billion times the mass of the Sun, it is the most massive structure within a distance of about a billion light-years from our Milky Way Galaxy," it added.