The European Space agency (ESA), on July 5, unveiled a spectacular new image of the universe – the extraordinary image essentially being a piecing together of pictures taken by the agency’s May-last-year launched Planck space telescope.

Noting that the Planck telescope was launched with the main objective of surveying the “oldest light” in the cosmos, the ESA claims that the new image is the sharpest image, thus far, of the early universe.

As per the details forwarded by the ESA, the Planck telescope has been virtually sweeping the sky to record microwave radiation - the residual glow from the Big Bang that resulted in the creation of the universe nearly 13.7 billion years back. The agency further added that it took nearly six months to assemble the map of the images captured by the Planck.

With Planck’s new image – which has been recorded at nine frequencies – clearly depicting slight variations in the universe’s temperature at different points in the sky, reflecting the distribution of matter when the universe was 380 million years old, researchers are of the opinion that the new dataset will further enrich their understanding of how the Universe acquires its present look.

In fact, with the Planck positioned at a gravitationally stable point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, it is expected that the ESA telescope would ultimately better the measurements of basic cosmological data by a factor of five, vis-à-vis NASA’s WMAP satellite.