The Planck space telescope has captured an image of the magnetic field lines of the Milky Way Galaxy that form the galaxy's "fingerprint."
Planck, a European Space Agency mission with contributions from NASA, stopped collecting data in 2013, but researchers are still studying the data to find more clues to the history of the universe, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The scientists are using polarizing light, from both the early universe and dust in our galaxy, to find these clues.
"This is the best picture we've ever had of the magnetic field of the Milky Way over such a large part of the sky," said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for the Planck mission at NASA's Propulsion Observatory in Pasadena, Calif.
The faint glow of the galaxy comes from the light of billions of distant stars inside the plane of Earth's galaxy. The Planck spacecraft helped scientists analyze the galaxy through wavelengths that cannot be detected by the human eye, Discovery News reported.
Planck was used to find whether the light came from the Big Bang or younger sources. The fingerprint was created by polarized light from small interstellar dust grains that exist in a straight line with magnetic fields.
Light exists as a wave of electric and magnetic fields that vibrate in directions at right angles to each other and to their direction of travel, Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported.
The light becomes polarized when they it vibrates in certain directions.
A technique called line integral convolution (LIC) was used to find the fingerprint. Polarized light emitted by dust particles traces out swirling patterns that look similar to the pattern of whorls and loops in a human fingerprint, Discovery News reported.
The wavy lines are created by magnetic fields twisting throughout the Milky Way. These magnetic fields align the rotations of the interstellar dust particles, shaping their radiation's net polarization.
Planck's data also showed variations of the polarization direction in nearby clouds of gas and dust, which can be found above and below the dark plane in the center of the image, Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported.
The data was submitted in a series of four papers to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
