ABSTRACT:
The Planck satellite has surveyed the full sky at 9 different frequencies covering the peak of microwave background intensity with high sensitivity and high angular resolution. In this talk I will present our maps of the sky and explain how we use them as a precision probe of the Universe across a range of distinct epochs, spanning over 40 orders of magnitude of increase in size. Not only do we probe the time at which the microwave light last interacted with matter, but we can use what we find there to peer back into the inflationary era, before the creation of the hot big bang. Due to the gravitational influence of the intervening matter on the microwave photons, we can learn about the distribution of dark matter in the more recent Universe. I will also discuss the implications of our findings for other cosmological probes, and for the Lambda CDM model, the standard model of cosmology.