This new photogenic moment, released Thursday, comes courtesy of the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, which detects cosmic microwave background radiation -- the light left over from the Big Bang.

CNN: Better 'baby picture' of universe emerges

In 1966 Kenneth Greisen, Vadim Kuzmin and Georgiy Zatsepin showed that high-energy charged particles (cosmic rays are mostly atomic nuclei, and thus positively charged) should be slowed by collisions with the photons of the cosmic microwave background (radiation left over from the Big Bang that permeates all space).

ECONOMIST: Cosmic rays: They came from outer space | The

They have produced highly accurate maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, which has its origins in the very early stages of the Universe.

BBC: Pictures of the early Universe

The new map is a smart byproduct of the European Space Agency (Esa) telescope's main mission which is to survey the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB - a pervasive but faint glow of long-wavelength radiation that comes to us from the very edge of the observable Universe.

BBC: Planck telescope: A map of all the 'stuff' in the cosmos