Latest Herschel Space Observatory Stories
Two new infrared catalogues, containing more than 1.3 million celestial sources, are made public today. The AKARI All-Sky Catalogues, based on the first all-sky infrared survey in more than a quarter of a century, will provide important new data for a wide range of studies that cover topics ranging from the properties of nearby stars, to the formation of planetary systems, and the star formation history of the distant Universe.All-sky surveys are an essential tool for astronomers. The large...
Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA's Planck satellite. Analyzing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation. Planck is principally designed to study the biggest mysteries of cosmology. How did the Universe form? How did the galaxies form? This new image extends the range of its investigations into the cold dust structures of our own Galaxy. The image shows the filamentary...
ESA's Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potential life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion Nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. This detailed spectrum, obtained with the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI) - one of Herschel's three innovative instruments - demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel-HIFI will provide on how organic molecules form in space. The spectrum, one of the first to be obtained with...
To map our home planet, Google Earth depends mostly on satellite imagery for land surfaces and sonar imagery for the sea floor. Maps of the Universe likewise depend on different kinds of detectors for different kinds of features. Maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), for example, depend on measuring minute differences in the temperature of the sky.When astrophysicist Julian Borrill came to Berkeley Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in 1997, his first...
ESA's Herschel observatory is back to full operation following the reactivation of its HiFi instrument. HiFi, having been offline for 160 days while engineers investigated an unexpected problem in the electronic system, is now perfectly placed to resume its study of forming stars and planets.HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared, was built specifically to observe water in a variety of celestial objects. Its first observation, on 22 June 2009, showed that it was performing...
The back up system of HIFI, the state of the art Dutch space instrument on ESA's Herschel space telescope, has been switched on successfully. Due to an unexpected voltage peak in the electronic system HIFI has been inactive for more than 160 days, but on Thursday evening 14 January Mission Control in Darmstadt confirmed that HIFI is now fully capable of performing groundbreaking observations in space again. The coming three years HIFI, built under the supervision of SRON Netherlands Institute...
A University of British Columbia astronomer has produced the most detailed images of deep space from 12 billion years ago, using data from the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory.Recently presented at the first International Herschel Science Meeting in Madrid, Spain, the images by UBC post-doctoral fellow Gaelen Marsden reveal tens of thousands of newly-discovered galaxies at the early stages of formation "“ just one billion years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was a...
An instrument package developed in part by the University of Colorado at Boulder for the $2.2 billion orbiting Herschel Space Observatory launched in May by the European Space Agency has provided one of the most detailed views yet of space up to 12 billion years back in time.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 Spectral and Photometric Imaging...
Herschel has peered inside an unseen stellar nursery and revealed surprising amounts of activity. Some 700 newly-forming stars are estimated to be crowded into filaments of dust stretching through the image. The image is the first new release of "˜OSHI', ESA's Online Showcase of Herschel Images.This image shows a dark cloud 1000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila, the Eagle. It covers an area 65 light-years across and is so shrouded in dust that no previous infrared satellite has...
The latest data delivered back to Earth by the Herschel Space Observatory (HSO)"”launched in May by the European Space Agency"”has opened a new window on galaxies for researchers at McMaster University.Herschel, the largest infrared telescope ever launched, is designed to study some of the coldest objects in space, located deep in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum that is still largely unexplored.Its massive one-piece mirror, which is almost one-and-a-half times larger than...
