The December images have revealed thousands of newly discovered galaxies in their early stages of formation, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Jason Glenn, a co-investigator on the project. The new images are being analyzed as part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey, or HerMES, which involves more than 100 astronomers from six countries.
Equipped with three cameras including SPIRE, the Herschel Space Observatory is about one and one-half times the diameter of the Hubble Space Telescope and orbiting nearly 1 million miles from Earth.
The Herschel Space Observatory (Photo Credit: European Space Agency)
Herschel is the first space observatory to make high-resolution images at submillimeter wavelengths, which are longer than visible and infrared light waves and shorter than radio waves. SPIRE was designed to look for emissions from clouds and dust linked to star-forming regions in the Milky Way and beyond, said Glenn. The most recent observations were made in the constellation Ursa Major, which includes the Big Dipper.
"The submillimeter sky is absolutely paved with galaxies," Glenn said. The newest images are "amazingly clear and deep," which enables astronomers to detect distant galaxies they would have no chance of discovering with current ground-based telescopes, he said. Since the light being observed with Herschel left the galaxies billions of years ago on its journey toward our solar system, the images are helping to reveal early star formation activity as well as the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies.
The Herschel team expects to discover hundreds of thousands of new galaxies at very early stages of their formations -- some more than 10 billion years old, he said. A single image from Herschel released in December revealed 10 times as many galaxies as have been seen before by all of the world's telescopes observing the skies in submillimeter wavelengths, said Glenn.
A major goal of the Herschel mission is to discover how early galaxies formed and evolved to give rise to present-day galaxies like our own, he said. Distant galaxies imaged by Herschel are so far away astronomers actually are looking at conditions as early as just over a billion or so years after the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. The SPIRE camera allows Herschel to detect radiation from very cold and distant objects, such as young stars and evolving galaxies.
The SPIRE team is studying the physical and chemical processes that take place in the distant interstellar medium to learn more about how stars are formed from molecular clouds, Glenn said. The submillimeter colors of the galaxies in the new images reveal information about their temperatures and distances -- bluer galaxies are relatively hotter and nearer, while the redder galaxies are cooler and farther away, he said.
"Herschel is providing a whole new window on the universe," said Glenn. "This project provides a fantastic opportunity for top scientists from around the world to work together to understand how stars and galaxies form and evolve."
Comments