Herschel looks into the Heart of Darkness May 10, 2010
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Star formation in Gould's Belt
Last week a big conference took place at the European Space Agency hub ESTEC, down the road in Noordwijk. The town was inundated with the lucky scientists who got to play with the first data from the new infrared space observatory Herschel and were finally allowed to talk about it to the rest of the world. And now that the conference is over, as expected, science from Herschel is everywhere!
APOD: Cold dust, Hot image March 22, 2010
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Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this stunning image of a section of the Galaxy as seen at far-infrared wavelengths. The high-resolution parts come from the recently launched Planck satellite, the rest from the older infrared satellite IRAS. The bright material shown in the image is very cold gas and dust, whose radiation peaks at these long infrared wavelengths.
Image: ESA, Planck HFI Consortium, IRAS
Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually November 22, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me, science . 1 comment so farThis week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
More success for Herschel July 11, 2009
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After the early sneak preview from the PACS instrument on board the recently launched Herschel infrared space telescope, more images have now been released from its other instruments, SPIRE and HIFI. The above image shows images taken with the IR imager and spectrometer SPIRE of nearby galaxy M74 at 250 micron. The amount of detail visible in the images is really great, particularly as all the image reconstruction software hasn’t even been optimised yet. We may be very used to seeing spectacularly detailed images from Hubble, but achieving these resolutions at Herschel’s far-infrared wavelengths is very new. (more…)
Europe's spacetastic 2009 February 11, 2009
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Herschel and Planck, snug as a bug
2009 is an exciting year for the European space community, with some high-profile launches, an astronaut recruitment programme, new launch vehicles, and, let’s not forget, a Belgian becoming the first ever European commander of the International Space Station.
Most anticipated for astronomers worldwide, however, is the launch of two major astronomy missions, Herschel and Planck. These two space telescopes are both designed to operate at the L2 Lagrangian point – a gravitationally stable point 1.5M km from Earth – and will be launched together on board an Ariane 5 on 16 April, from Korou.
