Apart from beauty – perhaps it recalls a stormy sky reflected on a lake – the last image that the Planck space observatory , of the European Space Agency (ESA) has served us , contains precious information: the magnetic footprint of our galaxy.
It has been made after analyzing the data of the light emitted by stars, gas and stellar dust, modified by magnetic fields throughout its trajectory. To do this, the observatory has detectors that isolate this polarized luminosity.
The darkest regions reflect the most altered radiation emissions, and the striations reflect the direction of the magnetic field. The strip in the center corresponds to the Galactic Plane , where most of the stars are.
Above and below this "equator" it is noticed that the lines – coming from gas and dust clouds – are more tangled and disorderly. Either way, the big picture reveals that there is a large-scale organization of magnetism in the Milky Way.
