The European Space Agency (ESA)’s Planck mission has revealed that our Galaxy contains previously undiscovered islands of cold gas and a mysterious haze of microwaves.

These results give scientists new treasure to mine and take them closer to revealing the blueprint of cosmic structure.

These results include the first map of carbon monoxide to cover the entire sky. Carbon monoxide is a constituent of the cold clouds that populate the Milky Way and other galaxies. Predominantly made of hydrogen molecules, these clouds provide the reservoirs from which stars are born.

However, hydrogen molecules are difficult to detect because they do not readily emit radiation. Carbon monoxide forms under similar conditions and, even though it is much rarer, it emits light (at microwave frequencies) more readily and therefore is more easily detectable. So, astronomers use it to trace the clouds of hydrogen.

Surveys of carbon monoxide undertaken with radio telescopes on the ground are extremely time consuming, hence they are limited to portions of the sky where molecular clouds are already known or expected to exist.

“The great advantage of Planck is that it scans the whole sky, allowing us to detect concentrations of molecular gas where we didn’t expect to find them,” says Planck collaborator Jonathan Aumont from the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale.

Planck has also detected a mysterious haze of microwaves that presently defies explanation.

It comes from the region surrounding the galactic center and looks like a form of energy called synchrotron emission. This is produced when electrons pass through magnetic fields after having been accelerated by supernova explosions.

The curiosity is that the synchrotron emission associated with the galactic haze exhibits different characteristics from the synchrotron emission seen elsewhere in the Milky Way.

The galactic haze shows what astronomers call a “harder” spectrum: its emission does not decline as rapidly with increasing energies.

Several explanations have been proposed for this unusual behavior, including higher supernova rates, galactic winds, and even the annihilation of dark-matter particles.

Planck’s primary goal is to observe the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and to measure its encoded information about the constituents of the Universe and the origin of cosmic structure.

But that requires first identifying and removing all sources of foreground emission, such as the galactic haze and the carbon monoxide signals.

Planck’s first cosmological dataset is expected to be released in 2013.