Spitzer Space Telescope Finds Bright Infrared Galaxies by Larry Klaes Ithaca NY (SPX) Mar 02, 2005
A Cornell University-led team operating the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS), the largest of the three main instruments on NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, has discovered a mysterious population of distant and enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy.
Their distance from Earth is about 11 billion light years, or 80 percent of the way back to the Big Bang.
Virtually everything about this new class of objects is educated speculation, the researchers say, since the galaxies are invisible to ground-based optical telescopes with the deepest reach into the universe.
"We think we have an idea of what they are, but we are not necessarily correct," says Cornell senior research associate in astronomy Dan Weedman.
Among the more probable ideas are that these mysterious bodies are ultraluminous infrared galaxies, powered either by an active galactic nuclei (AGN) or by a starburst, a massive burst of star formation.
AGNs are powered by the in-fall of matter to a massive black hole, while massive starbursts often are triggered by the collision of two or more galaxies.
What makes the objects studied by the Spitzer team stand out is that previously known AGNs are "not nearly as powerful, far away, or as dust-enshrouded" as these bodies are, says Weedman.
The Cornell Spitzer team's discovery is published in the March 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL), published by the American Astronomical Society. The Spitzer telescope, which went into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun in August 2003, is the last of NASA's Great Observatories, the Hubble being the first.
The IRS team used data obtained by the National Science Foundation's telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory, for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) Deep Wide-Field Survey.
The team also used a catalog of infrared sources obtained in a survey in early 2004 by another of the Spitzer telescope's instruments, the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS).
From the thousands of MIPS sources in a three-degree square patch of the sky -- about one-fourth the size of the bowl of the Big Dipper - in the constellation Bootes the Herdsman, the IRS team selected and observed 31 that are quite bright in the infrared but invisible in the NOAO survey.
"The NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey is the best available optical survey for comparing to our data," Weedman says. "It would have been much more difficult to make this discovery without such a wide area of comparison. These NOAO data allowed us to compare the sky at infrared and optical wavelengths and find things that had never been seen before."
The Bootes area was chosen by the NOAO team because of the absence of obscuring dust in our galaxy, presenting a clear view of the distant sky. The presence of these mysterious, infrared, bright, but optically invisible, objects was first hinted at in 1983 in a paper by James Houck, Cornell's Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy and principal investigator for the IRS.
Houck was interpreting data from another space probe he was involved with, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), the first astronomy mission devoted to searching the heavens for infrared sources. More than a decade later these strange objects were again recorded by the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory.
"Spitzer is more than 100 times more sensitive than IRAS for detecting objects at infrared wavelengths," says Houck.
"These celestial bodies are so far from our Milky Way galaxy that we detect them as they were when the universe was just 20 percent of its current age," says Sarah Higdon, a research associate in Cornell's Department of Astronomy, who led the group that developed the software package for analyzing Spitzer data.
I just tried compressing the 25 MB file using Windows compressed (zipped) folders. Turns out that it gets the 25,357 KB (~25 MB) file down to only 25 kilobytes.
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Where is this "free beer" everyone is always talking about? I must be getting screwed...even Keystone Light is costing me 15+...
Looks like you'll have to go to the European Union, which is promising both free beer and strong economic growth, so you won't have a problem.
Spitzer Space Telescope Finds Bright Infrared Galaxies
by Larry Klaes
Ithaca NY (SPX) Mar 02, 2005
A Cornell University-led team operating the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS), the largest of the three main instruments on NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, has discovered a mysterious population of distant and enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy.
Their distance from Earth is about 11 billion light years, or 80 percent of the way back to the Big Bang.
Virtually everything about this new class of objects is educated speculation, the researchers say, since the galaxies are invisible to ground-based optical telescopes with the deepest reach into the universe.
"We think we have an idea of what they are, but we are not necessarily correct," says Cornell senior research associate in astronomy Dan Weedman.
Among the more probable ideas are that these mysterious bodies are ultraluminous infrared galaxies, powered either by an active galactic nuclei (AGN) or by a starburst, a massive burst of star formation.
AGNs are powered by the in-fall of matter to a massive black hole, while massive starbursts often are triggered by the collision of two or more galaxies.
What makes the objects studied by the Spitzer team stand out is that previously known AGNs are "not nearly as powerful, far away, or as dust-enshrouded" as these bodies are, says Weedman.
The Cornell Spitzer team's discovery is published in the March 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL), published by the American Astronomical Society. The Spitzer telescope, which went into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun in August 2003, is the last of NASA's Great Observatories, the Hubble being the first.
The IRS team used data obtained by the National Science Foundation's telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory, for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) Deep Wide-Field Survey.
The team also used a catalog of infrared sources obtained in a survey in early 2004 by another of the Spitzer telescope's instruments, the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS).
From the thousands of MIPS sources in a three-degree square patch of the sky -- about one-fourth the size of the bowl of the Big Dipper - in the constellation Bootes the Herdsman, the IRS team selected and observed 31 that are quite bright in the infrared but invisible in the NOAO survey.
"The NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey is the best available optical survey for comparing to our data," Weedman says. "It would have been much more difficult to make this discovery without such a wide area of comparison. These NOAO data allowed us to compare the sky at infrared and optical wavelengths and find things that had never been seen before."
The Bootes area was chosen by the NOAO team because of the absence of obscuring dust in our galaxy, presenting a clear view of the distant sky. The presence of these mysterious, infrared, bright, but optically invisible, objects was first hinted at in 1983 in a paper by James Houck, Cornell's Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy and principal investigator for the IRS.
Houck was interpreting data from another space probe he was involved with, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), the first astronomy mission devoted to searching the heavens for infrared sources. More than a decade later these strange objects were again recorded by the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory.
"Spitzer is more than 100 times more sensitive than IRAS for detecting objects at infrared wavelengths," says Houck.
"These celestial bodies are so far from our Milky Way galaxy that we detect them as they were when the universe was just 20 percent of its current age," says Sarah Higdon, a research associate in Cornell's Department of Astronomy, who led the group that developed the software package for analyzing Spitzer data.
In addition to their incredible d
Well, his name is IMichael, so he might be a robot.
Spam! A spam!
dupe dupe dupe
they duped the URL (dupe dupe)
they duped the URL (dupe dupe)
they duped the URL...
As I walk though
Slashdot's world
Nothing can stop
These dupes of URLs...
etc. etc.
Linux is NOT dying!
Yes, and it appears that we can do the same thing with Slashdot's editors.
I just tried compressing the 25 MB file using Windows compressed (zipped) folders. Turns out that it gets the 25,357 KB (~25 MB) file down to only 25 kilobytes.
Sad news, yes, but at least I have 2^25,964,951 - 1 to keep me busy.
Use this tool to determine if the ID number of your /. comment is prime!
Can anyone post those digits in case the site gets /.'ed?
Or a hard-winded drivechain for your car...?
Aha! See my idea is to install Linux on a dead badger, I seriously doubt anyone has attempted that.
Think again.
Don't make me start my day over, CowboyNeal! I'm almost home!
They acquired Conectiva twice in the same day.
The song is "(Silence)" off of Ciccone Youth's The Whitey Album. Here is an iTMS link.
404 File Not Found
.001 degrees Celsius each time I tried to reload the article and saw the preceeding text.
The requested URL (science/05/02/18/1558239.shtml?tid=146&tid=14) was not found.
If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to pater@slashdot.org.
My body temperature rose about
Given their record in the security area, I don't know why anybody would buy from them.
Maybe because people aren't aware of the alternatives that are out there (Mac and Linux) or simply resist change.
Alright, give me a Pepsi free.
I think we had this coming all along; it just took Slashdot about 20 years to confirm it.
Slashdot confirms: Usenet is DYING.
What's this Usenet thing again? Slashdot confirms: Usenet is DYING.
All hail mighty Microsoft, for none is holier than thou.
What about licensing per machine instead of per CPU core?
Well, we have anti-AntiSpyware!