Planck Update

Just time for a very quick post today to pass on thhe news that most of the 2015 crop of papers from the Planck mission have now been released and are available to download here. You can also find some related data products here.

I haven’t had time to look at these in any detail myself, but my attention was drawn (in the light of the recently-released combined analysis of Planck and Bicpe2/Keck data) to the constraints on inflationary cosmological models shown in this figure:

It seems that the once-popular (because it is simple) $m^2 \phi^2$ model of inflation is excluded at greater than 99% confidence…

Feel free to add reactions to any of the papers in the new release via the comments box!

5 Responses to “Planck Update”

1. Is anyone else irritated by the recent trend to use colours to indicate nothing more than a few contour levels? Such a plot contains no more information than just plotting the contours in black and white. A grey scale of the PDF*, or, if you want, a (one-dimensional) colour scale provides more information (and the contours can be plotted in addition).

There might be some justification if, as here, several sets of contours are being plotted in the same plot. However, it has become very common to do so when plotting only one quantity. Also, the additional information is lost if there is a uniform colour while the PDF varies.

*probability-density function, not portable document format 🙂

2. James Gallagher Says: