February 14, 2012
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) - Images produced by the Planck satellite have revealed an enormous cloud of electrons traveling near the speed of light in the heart of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. These electrons interact with the Galaxy's magnetic field to produce a haze of microwave radiation seen by Planck.
The discovery builds upon earlier research by Planck team member Gregory Dobler, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. Dobler, along with collaborators, previously studied hints of this emission in images from the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe, and led the initial discovery of a gamma-ray counterpart in data from the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, originally termed the Fermi "haze" and later the Fermi "bubbles."
[UCSB Press Release] [JPL Press Release] [ESA Press Release]