The discovery that dust grains in deep space are spinning at mind-boggling rates could improve maps of the big bang's afterglow. The Planck spacecraft and a ground-based instrument in the Canary Islands have observed microwaves emitted by an interstellar dust cloud that are consistent with the grains turning on their axis tens of billions of times a second. The grains are light enough to be set spinning by collisions with photons and fast-moving atoms, and because some are charged this would cause them to emit microwave radiation.
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