A European telescope designed to capture light from the earliest Universe has returned its first images to Earth.
The Planck observatory is picking up radiation from just 300,000 years after the big bang and could give the clearest picture yet of what the Universe looked like just after its formation.
The first images confirm that the instruments on board the telescope are working correctly, although real scientific results are not expected until the middle of 2010.
The aim of the project is to capture light from the birth of the Universe, known as Cosmic Background Radiation, and to provide the sharpest ever images of the early Universe This will allow scientists to discard a number of possible scenarios about the birth of the Universe.
