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Infrared Telescope Lifts Off
An anonymous reader writes "On its Delta 2 Heavy-Lift vehicle, the Space Infrared Telescope (SIRTF) successfully launched to its solar orbit at 1:35 AM (EDT). As a result of the expansion of the Universe, most of the optical and ultraviolet radiation emitted from stars, galaxies, and quasars since the beginning of time now lies in the infrared. How and when the first objects in the Universe formed will be learned in large part from this observatory's infrared observations."
Now they can catch me speeding from outer space!
So as we try to see farther and farther, we need to get more infrared pictures. And we need to send bigger and bigger fridges into space with bigger cameras inside.
Soon they'll try the ultimate, using the recent MIT laser cooling technique to bring down the temperature to below 1 kelvins. Now thats when the ambient cosmic background radiation will become a pain.
Ive photographed in the night, and I know you need to keep the shutter open for up to a minute or more. I wonder if those giant freezers can hold still as they orbit around a planet that orbits around the sun. They will soon be needing LONG exposure times.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I work at Ball Aerospace... I thought some of you might like to see the BATC stuff.
Am I the only one who thinks that the SIRTF looks a bit like a high-end coffee machine?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
wow.
that looks just like an upside-down spy satellite!
lets hope the mirror didn't get mixed up with the 'real' mirrors this time.
> So, this means it will be able to see through those bikinis, eh?
First you'd have to spot one among the heavens. Aren't you being a tad optimistic?
Umm, d00d, I think you're supposed to understand that light was in those ranges when it was created, but redshift due to the expansion of space and the massive distances this light has travelled have resulted in it shifting down-spectrum into the infrared.
From your link:
The electromagnetic spectrum includes gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves. The only difference between these different types of radiation is their wavelength or frequency.
Dumbass....
I posted this as a news story yesterday. It was rejected.
Anyway,
Here's a nice article about SIRTF that I found to be pretty cool.
>> So, this means it will be able to see through those bikinis, eh?
>First you'd have to spot one among the heavens. Aren't you being a tad optimistic?
Haven't you seen Star Trek? I know how this is supposed to work!
Wait, you mean Star Trek: TOS lied to me?
Blasphemer!
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
This is great. The more telescopes we can get in orbit, the better. Especially those in different spectrums. There's so much data that the earth is being bomarded wioth constantly that is untapped. We're slowly getting more and more of this data and leaning so much about the universe because of it. I lok foward to the findings of this telescope.
Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
You know, its a sign of the quality of readers on here that this post got modded to +5, being completely wrong.
God, I hope they calculate the trajectories right or there might be an interesting "meteor" shower in about 60 years...
CNN Article
Well, I suppose you know about the red shift due to the general expansion of the universe? The most distant objects in the universe are now receeding away from us at such a massive rate that the visible light they emitted has been so far red shifted as to wind up in the infrared region. There's a Doppler effect for light that causes light from an object moving very quickly away from an observer to reach the observer at a lower frequency than what was transmitted (the red shift), just like a car moving away from you makes sounds at a lower pitch than were it standing still or moving towards you. Because of Hubble's law, the farther away an object is, the faster it's moving away from us, and consequently, the greater the Doppler effect. This infrared probe is designed to view objects that have been so far "red shifted" as to apparently be emitting infrared radiation.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Yes. Absolutely. I thought that the person who subitted the story was very careful about what (s)he said; that the light from high-z galaxies that we want to observe is emitted in the optical/UV.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Exqueeze me?
Perhaps I missed something by not RTFA, but EM DOES shift down the spectrum noticably as it travels large distances, and it ain't because of 'tired light'.
Maybe your post would have been more useful if you'd posted about why you think I was completely wrong, instead of just complaining.
Maybe your post would have been more useful if you looked a bit closer and realised he wasn't even replying to your post :P
You are exqueezed.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Page A1, Washington Post, December 30, 1983:
Possibly as Large as Jupiter; Mystery Heavenly Body Discovered
More on that article HERE.
Some of you won't be able to "get past" other parts of the "story" and so this will degenerate into a flame thread. In spite of that, I'm not gonna let this "news for geeks" website play ignorant again about science articles that may have more to them than meets the eye.
Question Everything.
What is the density of the universe (our solar system)?
Where does it end, when does a new one start?
Is the expanding universe slowing down expanding at n ever decreasing rate?
Tools like this can give us more substantial evidence in answering these questions. This knowledge is relevant in planning and preparing a space agenda for the near future.
The more we know about the physical properties of outer space, determined by measuring speed, direction and age of light/particles, the better we can launch more useful machines into space, as opposed to another pair of satellites for the next cable channel.
Perhaps the moderators experienced some red shift of their own and all turned blonde.
The optical and ultraviolet are indeed not in the infrared. But the post is saying these have been red-shifted by the universe's expansion, so that they are now detectable as infrared. That is the point of viewing the 'ancient light' in infrared, as it is modified by time.
No wonder this world is not yet rated for such... nonsense.
That's the real problem: people who don't know about science are moderating these discussions.
The IR is where many molecular spectral signatures can be found. This is a critical region of the spectrum for studying molecules in interstellar clouds.
the optical and ultraviolet regions do not lie in the infrared region.
Yeah, but...
Ultraviolet range is anything with a frequency above violet light, optical is the frequencies between violet to red, and infrared is anything with a frequency below red light.
Light that was emitted at an ultraviolet or optical wavelength can be slowed down in frequency - Dopler shift is probably the most well known. Heard of red-shift?
Any frequency - gamma rays to visible, if red-shifted far enough is now infrared, and that is what this telescope is looking for.
The entire statement you selectively quoted is:
As a result of the expansion of the Universe, most of the optical and ultraviolet radiation emitted from stars, galaxies, and quasars since the beginning of time now lies in the infrared. I added emphasis to the important part you left out.
So, while you are pedantically correct in that "Optical (visible?), ultraviolet and infrared are distinct parts of the electronmagnetic spectrum. [T]he optical and ultraviolet regions do not lie in the infrared region.", what was originally said is correct and your post does not correct anything.
By the way, unless you go with a definition of red and violet based on specific wavelengths, the designations "ultraviolet" and "infrared" are subjective, and may overlap with visible light to some extent. I am saying that MY definition of where the frequency gets high enough to no longer be visible and therefore becomes "ultraviolet" may not be the same point for you. It should be relatively close, but almost certainly not the exact same as it is subjective.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Here are some links to other projects that have similar goals - examining expansion of the universe, faraway objects, etc. They also have sophisticated infrared imaging capabilities. The James Webb Space Telescope (formerly Next Generation Space Telescope) is the successor to Hubble, and Supernova/Acceleration Probe which, from what I remember, locates potential supernovae by examining data taken at fixed ground locations then points an orbiting camera at the calculated location to collect radiation data. Really interesting stuff!
- "Thick" Java Client for proposals, planning and data retieval - yes folks, Java on the desktop does work
- Estimating and visibility servers - many computing drone managed by a J2EE server
- Web services access to all of the public data produced by SIRTF - Perl,
.NET, C++ is doesn't matter you can all get the data
Oh, I forgot the mention.... there is not a single Windows box in the operations system. It's all Unix based because... well you know why don't you?You remember this one? I do. Well sort of...Ouch!
Actually it has nothing to do with distance, but with frame of reference. IF light is redshifted due to movement, it is the movement of the observer relative to the source which is important. The light, relative to the source, is still at the same frequency it left the source at.
According to an observer on a speeding train, half the world emits lower frequency sounds than the other half. Does that mean that half the sounds in the world are actually lower frequency?
Because that would've been a dupe just like this story is.
I believe it is only the velocities that matter: the reason the spectra shift is because of the Doppler effect (similar to the lowering of sound when a fast car passes by, only now in the optical domain and with some adjustments for relativity)
The long distance the light has traveled does not matter. It just happens that stars that are far away have a high velocity to get that far in the first place.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
From the CNN.com article:
SIRTF's detectors are incredibly sensitive. If you could put a common household television remote control in deep space SIRTF could detect it at a distance of 25,000 miles.
Considering that taxpayers put up 1.9 billion for the observatory, do you think they could use it to find the remote cotrol that I lost in my living room?
Thank you, Captain Obvious!!!
Sorry, couldn't resist...
It's been my experience that heaven and bikinis are usually in very close proximity.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Doesn't that require evaporation? I seem to recall from college chemistry that the reason pumping works is due to evaporative cooling. Kind of like a liquid helium swamp cooler. I would think that it'd be hard to get useful evaporative cooling in space due to that whole vacuum thing.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It just happens that stars that are far away have a high velocity to get that far in the first place.
I know it's probably what you meant, but the distant stars/galaxies do not themselves have a high velocity, rather the expansion rate of their region space as viewed from our own frame of reference is high.
It is worth noting that the SIRTF SWIRE survey may be able to detect solar system sized supercomputers, aka Matrioshka Brains. For discussion see the thread starting here and navigate using the icons in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
It's not the quality of readers, it's the moderators that are mod'ing things that they don't understand. While, I know realize that my comment was incorrect for a reason that I did not consider when I commented, it did generate a discussion which arrived at the correct response.
Wrong. The long distances do matter a lot. The main reason far away objects seem to be speeding away from us is that the space between has been expanding in size. A photon traveling through this expanding space also stretches, and the further it has to go the more it stretches. Doppler has nothing to do with it.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I seem to recall from college chemistry that the reason pumping works is due to evaporative cooling.
It sounds like he's just talking about straightforward refrigeration: pump a refrigerant to a low pressure, and it boils, absorbing heat from whatever you want cooled; then pump it back up to a high pressure, and it condenses, dumping the heat somewhere else. The refrigerant never actually gets used up unless there's a leak.
Around any pair of orbiting bodies are what we call the Lagrange points... points of relative stability where gravitational forces balance out.
L2 is, I believe, opposite the Sun on the other side of earth... I am unsure if it would be in shadow, as I'm not sure of the distance... but something sitting there will have a year the same length as the earth.
This is due to the earth's gravity added to the suns.. effectively something at L2 feels like it's orbiting a heavier mass, so it can orbit faster to keep up.
There are four other lagrange points... one towards the sun (where the SOHO solar observation satellite lives), (L1)
One on the opposite side of the Sun from us (always behind the sun from our point of view, so that's where the hidden planet X is)
And two ahead and behind our orbit, sort of (google up a diagram). these are sometiems called "Trojan points"... asteroids are found orbiting these points by Jupiter, Mars... not at earth, though large concentrations of dust have been found gathered there.
Ha! They give gravitational binding energy in Watts!!! Quite the reputable source.
If you were discussing the planetary dismantlement paper, that problem is now corrected.
Wouldnt it be the "infrared telescope extends into space"
Perhaps Cmdr Taco should tell Nasa who we select?
No answers on a post card, please...
See: this article in Space Today on SIRTF.
...-.-
I mean I understand it is a high stress job, but he made George Bush sound like a confident and interesting orator....
Dubyah has better script writers to.
Q.
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