| Abstract: | The ESA’s Planck satellite, dedicated to studying the early universe, was
launched on May 2009 and has been surveying the microwave and submillimetre sky
since August 2009. In March 2013, ESA and the Planck Collaboration publicly
released the initial cosmology products based on the first 15.5 months of
Planck operations, along with a set of scientific and technical papers and a
web-based explanatory supplement. This paper describes the mission and its
performance, and gives an overview of the processing and analysis of the data,
the characteristics of the data, the main scientific results, and the science
data products and papers in the release. Scientific results include robust
support for the standard, six parameter LCDM model of cosmology and improved
measurements for the parameters that define this model, including a highly
significant deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum.
The Planck values for some of these parameters and others derived from them are
significantly different from those previously determined. Several large scale
anomalies in the CMB temperature distribution detected earlier by WMAP are
confirmed with higher confidence. Planck sets new limits on the number and mass
of neutrinos, and has measured gravitational lensing of CMB anisotropies at 25
sigma. Planck finds no evidence for non-Gaussian statistics of the CMB
anisotropies. There is some tension between Planck and WMAP results; this is
evident in the power spectrum and results for some of the cosmology parameters.
In general, Planck results agree well with results from the measurements of
baryon acoustic oscillations. Because the analysis of Planck polarization data
is not yet as mature as the analysis of temperature data, polarization results
are not released. We do, however, illustrate the robust detection of the E-mode
polarization signal around CMB hot- and cold-spots. |
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