With new data, Planck satellite brings early universe into focus

From its orbit 930,000 miles above Earth, the Planck space telescope spent more than four years detecting the oldest light in the universe, called the cosmic microwave background. This fossil from the Big Bang fills every square inch of the sky and offers a glimpse of what the universe looked like almost 14 billion years ago, when it was just 380,000 years old. Planck's observations of this relic radiation shed light on everything from the evolution of the universe to dark matter.