Through the Cosmic looking Glass
Four days after its launch on August 25 ,2003 ,NASA Spitzer Space
Telescope opened its
infrared eyes for the first time .Two years later ,Spitzer continues to surpass expectations by uncovering a hidden universe teeming with warm stellar embryos ,chaotic planet-forming disks, majestic galaxies ,hidden
black holes .remnants of dead stars ,and much more….
Just nine months after telescope began its initial observations in December 2003,Spitzer astronomers announced for the first time that
planets are built in massive collisions by bodies as big as mountain ranges over a long period.
One year later in a collaborative effort with NASA Hubble Space Telescope(HST) ,Spitzer and HST scientists publicly verified that the dusty disks circling a stars are indeed planetary construction zones .By 2005 ,Spitzer had discovered an asteroid belt circling a star similar to our sun and learned that planets will form and revolve around small, failed stars ,or brown dwarfs ,a little bigger than Jupiter .All of these discoveries provided scientists with valuable insights into the formation of planets.
Earlier this year ,Spitzer astronomers also devised a new technique for detecting
light directly from planets outside our solar system ,called the eclipsing phenomenon. After measuring the infrared light of two known planets and their stars, astronomers waited until the planets were eclipsed by their suns to measure the light of the star alone .From this information they pinpointed exactly how much light was being emitted directly from the planets. This allowed astronomers to do direct comparisons between different planets ,define their size ,orbit ,and determine whether any of these systems are suitable for life.
In addition to planets ,Spitzer surprise discoveries also include the universe missing population of super massive black hole or quasars .While visible light cannot escape the immense gravitational pull of a Black Hole ,X-rays can .By measuring the amount of X-rays in the universe with other observatories and comparing them with the number of known quasars ,scientists found a discrepancy and suspected that there must be a population hiding behind cosmic
dust .Until Spitzer sensitive infrared eyes ,no telescope could pierce though this thick dust to confirm that these missing quasars existed.
As the universe expands ,starlight from distant galaxies is shifted from blue to red and , ultimately into the infrared. Because distance equals time in space ,radiation emitted by stars ,galaxies. And other
objects in the early universe now lies partially in the infrared and can be detected by Spitzer. This is the old universe that Spitzer probes.
Similarly since infrared radiation is associated with heat ,all objects warmer than absolute zero(-273 degrees Celsius)emits in the infrared .and can be detected by Spitzer .Thus Spitzer reveals that cold objects hiding in the dark corners of the universe.
In the past ,thick clouds of cosmic dust have hidden stars ,black holes .asteriods ,comets ,and planets from optical telescopes .However ,because the dust and rocks surrounding a star will naturally absorb the star heat and re-radiate it in the infrared ,Spitzer also studies the universe dirty objects .
The telescope is the last of NASA Great Observatories Programme .Following in the tradition of the Hubble Space Telescope(HST) which peers at the cosmos in visible light ,and the Compton Gamma Ray(CGRO) and Chandra X-ray Observatories(CXO) which detect the universe most violent explosions using Gamma Ray and X-ray light ,Spitzer exposes objects that are old cold, and shrouded in dust by observing the infrared sky.
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