Deflecting light from the Big Bang

This artist’s impression shows how photons in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are deflected by the gravitational lensing effect of massive cosmic structures as they travel across the Universe. Gravitational lensing creates tiny, additional distortions to the mottled pattern of the CMB temperature fluctuations. Planck cosmologists have extracted a map of this gravitational lensing effect covering the whole sky for the first time, providing a new way to probe the evolution of structure in the Universe over time.