Infrared Wavelengths | SilverScorpio.Com

Galaxy merger dilemma solved

April 21, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, April 21 (ANI): A long-standing dilemma about the mass of infrared bright merging galaxies has finally been solved by scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

Dr. Barry Rothberg along with Dr. Jacqueline Fischer used new data from the 8-meter Gemini-South telescope in Chile along with earlier results from the W. M. Keck-2 10-meter and University of Hawaii 2.2-meter telescopes in Hawaii and archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope, to solve the problem.

Galaxies in the Universe generally come in two shapes, spiral, like our own Milky Way, and elliptical, in which the stars move in random orbits.

The largest galaxies in the Universe are elliptical in shape and how they formed is central to our understanding how the Universe has evolved over the last 15 billion years.

The long-standing theory has been that spiral galaxies merge with each other forming most of the elliptical galaxies in the Universe.

Spiral galaxies contain significant amounts of cold hydrogen gas. When they merge, the beautiful spiral patterns are destroyed and the gas is converted into new stars and with it, large amounts of dust. The dust is heated by the young stars and radiates energy at infrared wavelengths.

Until recently scientists thought that these infrared bright merging galaxies were not massive enough to be the precursors of most elliptical galaxies in the Universe.

The conventional method of measuring mass in dusty IR-bright galaxies uses near-infrared light, which can penetrate dust, to measure the random motions of old-stars.

The larger the random motions, the more mass is present. When spirals merge, gas from both galaxies forms a central rotating disk which then forms new stars.

These young stars outshine the old stars at near-infrared wavelengths making it appear as if the old stars have less random motion. Rothberg and Fischer instead observed the random motions of old stars at shorter wavelengths effectively using the dust to block the light from the young stars.

Their new results showed that the old stars in merging galaxies have large random motions, which means they will eventually become very massive elliptical galaxies.

The new research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: Archival Data, bright galaxies, Conventional Method, elliptical galaxies, galaxies in the universe, Galaxy Merger, Hubble Space Telescope, Hydrogen Gas, Infrared Light, infrared wavelengths, Meter Telescopes, naval research laboratory, new stars, orbits, Random Motion, Random Motions, spiral galaxies, Spiral Patterns, University Of Hawaii, young stars

Teledyne Infrared Sensors Survey the Universe

March 5, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif.–(Business Wire)–
Teledyne Technologies Incorporated (NYSE:TDY) announced today that its
subsidiary, Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, LLC (TS&I), has a key role in NASA`s
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), with two of Teledyne`s megapixel
imaging sensors at the heart of the WISE infrared camera. The mission will be
the most sensitive infrared survey ever made of the universe.

Operating in a sun-synchronous low Earth orbit, WISE is designed to scan the
entire sky in infrared light, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of
objects and producing millions of images. It is anticipated that objects never
seen before will be discovered, including the coolest stars, the universe`s most
luminous galaxies and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets. Its
vast catalogs will help answer fundamental questions about the origins of
planets, stars and galaxies, and provide a mountain of data for astronomers to
mine for decades to come. The WISE catalog will guide the observations of the
Hubble Space Telescope (HST), ground-based observatories, and the James Webb
Space Telescope (JWST).

The WISE observatory is hundreds of times more sensitive than previous space
missions due in part to its advanced detector technology. There are four
megapixel infrared sensors in WISE and Teledyne provided two of them (each is
1024×1024 pixels). The Teledyne sensors detect light at bands centered at 3.4
and 4.6 microns; 5 to 7 times longer than the longest wavelengths that can be
detected by the human eye. At these wavelengths, WISE will detect the thermal
emission of cooler objects, such as brown dwarf stars, and will see the visible
light from distant galaxies that has been stretched into infrared wavelengths by
the expansion of the universe (known as “redshift”).

The Teledyne infrared detectors are made from an advanced detector technology
pioneered by Teledyne called “substrate-removed HgCdTe.” The detector material
is a crystal lattice that is specially grown from the elements mercury, cadmium
and tellurium. This type of detector provides improved infrared sensitivity with
the lowest noise, vital for detecting the faint signals from distant objects.
Teledyne`s sensors with this advanced technology have already been critical to
the success of several NASA missions. A megapixel sensor was installed in May
2009 in the HST Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument, a combined
visible-infrared sensor operated in the Moon Mineralogy Mapper that discovered
water on the moon, and fifteen 4-megapixel sensors from Teledyne will be used in
the JWST. Teledyne`s substrate-removed HgCdTe focal plane array is the baseline
technology for several future space astronomy and Earth observation missions,
and is now the standard for ground-based astronomy.

The most sensitive infrared surveys of the universe must be made from space to
avoid the high level of infrared light produced by the Earth`s atmosphere and to
avoid the absorption of infrared light by the atmosphere. In spite of the
limitations of ground-based observations, the most thorough all-sky infrared
survey to date has been the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) that was conducted
by the University of Massachusetts and the California Institute of Technology
during 1997-2001. The 2MASS used telescopes located in Arizona and Chile with
the largest infrared arrays that were available at the time; each infrared
camera had three Teledyne sensors of 256×256 pixels, one-sixteenth the size of
the WISE sensors. 2MASS produced a catalog of over 500 million objects that has
guided infrared astronomy for the past decade.

JPL manages WISE for NASA`s Science Mission Directorate. The mission was
competitively selected under NASA`s Explorers Program, which NASA`s Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in
Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies
Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data
processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about WISE, visit http://www.nasa.gov/wise and
http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.

Teledyne Technologies is a leading provider of sophisticated electronic
components, instrumentation and communication products, engineered systems,
aerospace engines, and energy and power generation systems. Teledyne
Technologies` operations are primarily located in the United States, the United
Kingdom and Mexico. For more information, visit Teledyne Technologies` website
at www.teledyne.com.

Teledyne Technologies Incorporated
Investor Contact:
Jason VanWees, 805-373-4542
or
Media Contact:
Robyn E. McGowan, 805-373-4540

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: Detector Technology, distant galaxies, Dwarf Stars, expansion of the universe, Hubble Space Telescope, hubble telescope, Infrared Detectors, infrared sensors, Infrared Survey, infrared wavelengths, James Webb Space Telescope, Low Earth Orbit, luminous galaxies, millions of images, Near Earth Asteroids, scientific imaging, Space Missions, stars and galaxies, Webb Space Telescope, Wise Observatory

Venus may once have been more Earth-like

July 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Paris, July 14 (ANI): Venus Express has charted the first map of the planet’s southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths, which hints that Venus may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water.

The map comprises over a thousand individual images, recorded between May 2006 and December 2007.

Because Venus is covered in clouds, normal cameras cannot see the surface, but Venus Express used a particular infrared wavelength that can see through them.

Although radar systems have been used in the past to provide high-resolution maps of Venus’s surface, Venus Express is the first orbiting spacecraft to produce a map that hints at the chemical composition of the rocks.

The new data is consistent with suspicions that the highland plateaus of Venus are ancient continents, once surrounded by ocean and produced by past volcanic activity.

“This is not proof, but it is consistent. All we can really say at the moment is that the plateau rocks look different from elsewhere,” said Nils Muller at the Joint Planetary Interior Physics Research Group of the University Munster and DLR Berlin, who headed the mapping efforts.

The rocks look different because of the amount of infrared light they radiate into space, similar to the way a brick wall heats up during the day and gives off its heat at night.

Besides, different surfaces radiate different amounts of heat at infrared wavelengths due to a material characteristic known as emissivity, which varies in different materials.

The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) instrument captured this infrared radiation during Venus’s night-time orbits around the planet’s southern hemisphere.

The new map shows that the rocks on the Phoebe and Alpha Regio plateaus are lighter in colour and look old compared to the majority of the planet.

On Earth, such light-coloured rocks are usually granite and form continents.

Granite is formed when ancient rocks, made of basalt, are driven down into the planet by shifting continents, a process known as plate tectonics.

The water combines with the basalt to form granite and the mixture is reborn through volcanic eruptions.

“If there is granite on Venus, there must have been an ocean and plate tectonics in the past,” said Muller.

The new map gives astronomers another tool in their quest to understand why Venus is so similar in size to Earth and yet has evolved so differently. (ANI)

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Clear images of starburst galaxies reveal new picture of early universe

May 28, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 28 (ANI): A telescope designed by a University of Miami physicist and an international team of collaborators has produced the clearest images of starburst galaxies, revealing a new picture of the universe in its early stages.

The innovative new telescope, called BLAST (Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope), was built by an international research team, which included Joshua Gundersen, University of Miami professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The team launched the telescope to the edge of the atmosphere, where it discovered previously unidentified dust-obscured, star-forming galaxies that could help illuminate the origins of the universe.

“BLAST has given us a unique picture into the development of other galaxies and the earliest stages of star formation of our own Milky Way,” Gundersen explained.
The light we’re getting from these submillimeter galaxies is from a time when they were first forming. In a sense, it’s like getting a baby picture,” he added.

The data analyzed over the past two years reveals close to a thousand of these “starburst” galaxies that lie five to ten billion light years from Earth, produce stars at an incredible rate, and hide about half of the starlight in the cosmos.

Until BLAST came along, most of the galaxies in the universe have been detected at optical wavelengths visible to the naked eye.

The “starburst” galaxies identified by Gundersen and his colleagues however are a new class of galaxies, enshrouded by dust that absorbs most of their starlight and then re-emits it at far-infrared wavelengths.

During an 11-day flight in 2006, the telescope, while tethered to a balloon 120,000 feet above Antarctica, took measurements in three different submillimeter wavelengths that are nearly impossible to observe from the ground.

“By going to balloon altitudes, we got a nice, crystal-clear picture of these things,” Gundersen said. “It is these far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths that we’re able to detect with BLAST,” Gundersen explained.

The data from BLAST is being combined with information from other NASA observatories like the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, helping astronomers and cosmologists to better understand the evolutionary history of these “starburst” galaxies and how they may be associated with larger-scale structures in the universe. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: baby picture, college of arts and sciences, Day Flight, early universe, galaxies in the universe, gundersen, infrared wavelengths, light-years, Milky Way, Millimeter Telescope, naked eye, optical wavelengths, Origins Of The Universe, physicist, picture of the universe, star-formation, starburst galaxies, starlight, submillimeter wavelengths, universe blast, University of Miami

Astronomers to search for precursors to life in cosmic dust

May 6, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 6 (ANI): A University of Michigan astronomer has decided to use the Herschel Space Observatory to study the organic molecules that make up life on Earth in new detail in the warm clouds of gas and dust around young stars.

The astronomer in question is Ted Bergin, an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan.

He hopes to gain insights into how organic molecules form in space, and possibly, how life formed on Earth.

“The chemistry of space makes molecules that are the precursors of life. It’s possible that the Earth didn’t have to make these things on its own, but that they were provided from space,” said Bergin.

Herschel, a European Space Agency mission with NASA participation, is scheduled to launch on May 14.

An orbiting telescope that will unlock new wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, it will allow astronomers to observe at the far-infrared wavelengths where organic molecules and water emit their chemical signatures.

“We’ll be studying the full extent of chemistry in space and we hope to learn what types of organics are out there as a function of their distance from a star,” Bergin said. “And we want to understand the chemical machinery that led to the formation of these organics,” he added.

In faraway galaxies and stellar nurseries, astronomers have detected complex organic sugar and hydrocarbon molecules that are key components in chlorophyll in plants and RNA.

Bergin expects to detect tens if not hundreds of these kinds of compounds – some of which have never been found before outside the Earth. (ANI)

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Astronomers discover local star’s cool companion

April 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 21 (ANI): An international team, led by astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, has discovered one of the coolest sub-stellar bodies ever found outside our own solar system.

The stellar companion orbits the red dwarf star Wolf 940, some 40 light years from Earth.

According to Dr Ben Burningham, of the University of Hertfordshire, “Although it has a temperature of 300 degrees Celsius, which is almost hot enough to melt lead, temperature is relative when you study this sort of thing, and this object is very cool by stellar standards.”

“In fact, this is the first time we’ve been able to study an object as cool as this in such detail. The fact that it is orbiting a star makes it extra special,” he said.

The object is thought to have formed like a star, but has ended up looking more like Jupiter.

It is roughly the same size, despite being between 20 and 30 times as heavy, and when the infrared spectral “fingerprints” of the two objects are compared, their resemblance is striking.

The new object orbits its star at about 440 times the distance at which the Earth orbits the sun. At such a wide distance, it takes about 18,000 years to complete a single orbit.

Too small to be stars, so-called “brown dwarfs” have masses lower than stars but larger than gas giant planets like Jupiter.

Due to their low temperature, these objects are very faint in visible light, and are detected by their glow at infrared wavelengths.

In most cases, astronomers don’t initially know much about the age and composition of brown dwarfs and this can make it hard to tell where the models are right, and where they are going wrong.

“What’s so exciting in this case, is that we can use what we know about the primary star to find out about the properties of the brown dwarf, and that makes it an extremely useful find,” explained Dr Burningham.

“You can think of it as a Rosetta Stone for decrypting what the light from such cool objects is telling us,” he said.

The object has been named Wolf 940B, after the red dwarf star that it orbits.

“Red dwarfs are the most populous stars in the Galaxy, and systems like this may be more common than we know,” said Dr David Pinfield of the University of Hertfordshire.

“As the generation of ongoing large scale surveys continues, we may discover a pack of Wolf-940B-like objects in our solar back yard,” he added. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: Astronomers, brown dwarf, Brown Dwarfs, burningham, earth orbits, fingerprints, Gas Giant Planets, infrared wavelengths, light-years, low temperature, lower than stars, object orbits, own solar system, red dwarf star, rosetta stone, star wolf, stellar bodies, stellar companion, stellar standards, university of hertfordshire, visible light

Half of Universe’s starlight comes from young star-forming galaxies

April 9, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 9 (ANI): Using a two-tonne telescope, scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have found that half of the starlight of the Universe comes from young, star-forming galaxies several billion light years away.

The finding was a result of a two-year analysis of data from the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope (BLAST) project.

“While those familiar optical images of the night sky contain many fascinating and beautiful objects, they are missing half of the picture in describing the cosmic history of star formation,” said UBC Astronomy Professor Douglas Scott.

“Stars are born in clouds of gas and dust,” said Barth Netterfield, a cosmologist in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at U of T.

“The dust absorbs the starlight, hiding the young stars from view. The brightest stars in the Universe are also the shortest lived and many never leave their stellar nursery. However, the warmed dust emits light at far-infrared and submillimetre wavelengths – invisible to the human eye, but visible to the sensitive thermo-detectors on BLAST,” he added.

According to UBC Professor Mark Halpern, part of the UBC team that also includes post-doctoral fellows Ed Chapin and Gaelen Marsden, “The history of star formation in the universe is written out in our data. It is beautiful. And it is just a taste of things to come.”

The study combines BLAST submillimetre observations at wavelengths around 0.3 mm – between infrared and microwave wavelengths – with data at much shorter infrared wavelengths from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

It confirmed that all of the Far Infrared Background comes from individual distant galaxies, answering a decade-old question of the radiation’s origin.

“BLAST has given us a new view of the Universe,” said Netterfield, whose U of T colleagues on the project include department chair Peter G. Martin and graduate students Marco P. Viero, Donald V. Wiebe (now a post-doc at UBC) and Enzo Pascale (now a faculty member at Cardiff University).

“The data we collected enable us to make discoveries in topics ranging from the formation of stars to the evolution of distant galaxies,” he added. (ANI)

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Tunguska-sized asteroid buzzes past Earth

March 4, 2009 By admin 1 Comment

London, March 3 (ANI): Reports indicate that an asteroid about the size of the one that levelled the forest in Tunguska, Siberia, a century ago, buzzed past Earth on March 2nd, well within the Moon’s orbit.

According to a report in New Scientist, the asteroid, dubbed 2008 DD45, whizzed just 72,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

That is less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon and just twice the distance to geosynchronous satellites.

The object was first reported on March 1st by members of the Siding Spring Survey, a near-Earth object search programme based in Australia.

“Based on its brightness, the asteroid seems to be between 20 and 50 metres across,” said Timothy Spahr of the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.

That rivals the size of the asteroid, estimated to be as small as 30 metres, that slammed into Tunguska, Siberia in 1908, creating a powerful blast that levelled 2000 square kilometres of forest.

Astronomers hope to get a better estimate of DD45′s span by observing it at infrared wavelengths to estimate how well the rock reflects light.

By modelling the rock’s orbit over the coming days, astronomers also hope to have a better sense of the threat it may pose to Earth in the next 100 years or so, Spahr told New Scientist.

DD45 seems to orbit the Sun once every 1.5 years.

DD45, which passed just 0.00048 AU from Earth, is one of a growing list of potentially hazardous asteroids that have been spotted by astronomers in advance of their closest approach. (ANI)

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Giant ‘stellar factory’ identified in early galaxy

February 7, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Feb 5 (ANI): Astronomers have identified a giant star producing region in a galaxy in the very early universe, which is millions of times larger than anything comparable in the Milky Way.

According to a report in New Scientist, the work bolsters the case that massive galaxies formed very quickly, in spectacular bursts of star formation, soon after the big bang.

Regions of intense star formation, called starbursts, span a few light years at most in the Milky Way, and less than a few hundred light years in nearby, bright galaxies such as Arp 220.

But, it has not been clear how large the stellar nurseries were in the early universe.

To find out, researchers led by Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, carefully scrutinized a distant galaxy whose light has taken so long to reach Earth that it appears as it was just 870 million years after the big bang.

It is visible at such distances because it hosts a beacon-like quasar, a bright region created by superheated gas falling towards a colossal black hole at the galaxy’s core.

The quasar, called J114816.64+525150.3, is so bright that it overwhelms the surrounding galaxy’s light at visible and near-infrared wavelengths.

But, the galaxy’s gas and warm dust can be detected at radio and far-infrared wavelengths.

Using an array of telescopes in the French Alps, the team measured the galaxy’s ionised carbon, which emits a strong signal at far-infrared wavelengths.

Far-infrared radiation is thought to be a signature of dust that has been heated up by nearby star formation.

The ionised carbon spanned a region at the heart of the galaxy about 5000 light years across. Based on the galaxy’s brightness at far-infrared wavelengths, this starburst region is thought to produce an astounding 1000 Sun-like stars every year.

That is “about 1000 times higher than the star-formation rate of the Milky Way”, said team member Chris Carilli, chief scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico.

“It’s forming stars at the maximal rate allowed, on scales that are 106 or 108 times larger in volume than similar regions in the Milky Way. That’s remarkable,” he added.

“The immense scale of the stellar factory is probably due to the fact that there was a lot more gas around in the early universe,” Carilli said.

Matter in the universe was indeed much denser soon after the big bang, since space itself has expanded over time. (ANI)

Filed Under: Science News Tagged With: bright galaxies, chief scientist, distant galaxy, early universe, french alps, heidelberg germany, infrared radiation, infrared wavelengths, intense star, ionised, london feb, massive galaxies, max planck institute, max-planck, national radio astronomy, New Scientist, star formation rate, starburst region, stellar nurseries, warm dust