Distant Dust Disk Mixes Fact with Fiction
Sometimes, separating observation from speculation presents a challenge. For example, a recent news report of a possible planet in outer space mixed an observation with ideas of distant planet formation. Does this news coverage provide enough detail to help tease apart what is seen from what was unseen?
The Planck Data and the Big Bang
On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA) published a new image of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, generated from data collected by the Planck space telescope. Big Bang cosmologists interpret the CMB to be "left-over" radiation from a time about 380,000 years after the alleged Big Bang.1 These are the highest resolution images of the CMB to date.