Brrrr...

If you thought is was cold in your front room without the fire on then take a look at this dramatic picture of a region of space 500 light years from Earth taken by the new orbiting Planck telescope.

The image shows an unimaginably large cloud of super-cooled dust which on average is hovering at a balmy 12K or -261C, the amazing thing is that spying phenomena like this is not Plank's main mission, the only reason it captures images like this is so that it's computer software can "cancel" out the light produced by relatively close objects such as this cloud and attempt to resolve radiation from much further afield, in fact as far back as the beginning of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

This majestic cloud is vast, entire stars may be born from and within it as gravity acts on the particles pulling them together until the energy levels become so high that fusion starts to occur. The scale that this picture captures is mind boggling, however is puny compared to the entire universe as it represents just a thin sliver of the visible sky.