New telescope reveals secrets

WASHINGTON — NASA unveiled the first views Thursday from its space infrared telescope, a super-cooled orbiting observatory that can look through obscuring dust to capture images never before seen.

The telescope, a $670 million project launched in August, can detect extremely faint waves of infrared radiation, or heat. Astronomers for the first time are able to peer into the heart of stellar fields that had been blocked from the view of conventional telescopes by dense clouds of dust and gas.

"This gives us a powerful new capability that will enable us to see things not seen before and to answer questions we couldn’t even ask before. This is a very powerful new tool for astronomy," Michael Werner, an astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said. He is the project scientist for the Spitzer Space Telescope, named in honor of the famed astronomer Lyman Spitzer Jr.

Added Giovanni Fazio, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a Spitzer researcher: "We are now able for the first time to lift the cosmic veil that has blocked out view and see the universe in all of its components."

Some of the first views from the Spitzer included:

A galaxy that was mostly blurred in the view of other telescopes. In the Spitzer image, there are vast fields of stars in a spiral necklace surrounding the galaxy. The image also detects clouds of glowing carbon dust.

A patch of sky that appears black and empty to visible light telescopes is revealed by the Spitzer to be a stellar nursery, a large cloud of dust wherein stars and other bodies are forming, "That’s what the solar system looked like in the beginning," said Fazio.

An object 3.25 billion light years away that is almost invisible to other instruments is seen as a highly energetic galaxy, glowing with an energy 1,000 times that of the Milky Way, the home galaxy of the sun and Earth. Embedded within the clouds of the galaxy are organic molecules, such as carbon dioxide and cyanide, that are thought to be the chemical building blocks of life.

A comet streaking through the solar system some 550,000 million miles from the sun. It is surrounded by a cloud about 20 times bigger than Jupiter; the Spitzer sees to the comet’s glowing core.

The telescope, sirtf.caltech.edu, completes NASA’s original plan to orbit telescopes to study segments of the electromagnetic spectrum, the visible and invisible radiation that fills the universe, which is partially or completely blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Hubble, launched in 1990, gathers images in visible, ultraviolet and near-infrared waves. The Compton, launched in 1991, studied gamma rays, a high energy form of radiation. Its mission ended in 1999. The Chandra Observatory, launched in 1999, studies X-ray radiation from supernovas and black holes.

Now the Spitzer collects infrared radiation which is invisible to the naked eye, but which is able to penetrate dust and gas.

Spitzer, a Princeton University astronomer, proposed in 1946, long before the first orbital rocket, that the nation put telescopes into space, above the obscuring effects of the atmosphere.

Spitzer is considered one of the most significant astronomers of the 20th century, the author of textbooks still studied in college. He did fundamental studies of the interstellar medium, the gas and dust that fill vast reaches of space and which play a key role in the formation of stars and planets.

He died in 1997.

John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said the Spitzer will enable astronomers to study the birth pangs of stars and the formation of planets out to the very edge of the universe.

"We will be able to see things that human beings have never before seen," he said. "This will change the way astronomers do astronomy."