Posted by Raimondo Pictet | 4 comments
A wise telescope launched today
NASA’s latest space telescope, WISE, was launched a few dozen of minutes ago. I know, NASA always comes up with cool names for their missions. WISE stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.
Basically, this telescope with map 99% of the universe as seen from Earth’s orbit in all infrared light wave-lengthed 3 through 25 micrometers. The mission will last around seven months.
According to the official mission objectives, ” WISE will:
- Find the most luminous galaxies in the Universe.
- Find the closest stars to the Sun.
- Detect most Main Belt asteroids larger than 3 km.
- Enable a wide variety of studies ranging from the evolution of planetary debris discs to the history of star formation in normal galaxies.
- Provide an important source catalog for JWST. “
To be honest, I thought we had already found the closest stars to the Sun. Weren’t they Proxima Centauri and Alpha Centauri? These are actually the closest known stars, but astronomers today think that there are twice as many stars in proximity of the sun (and, as a matter fact, everywhere in the universe) than we previously detected.
Astronomers will be looking for what they call “brown dwarfs”, small, old, dying stars that do not produce much energy. Stars that could be as cold as icebergs on earth. WISE will be thousands to hundred of thousands more sensitive to infrared light than new telescopes. Furthurmore, it will search in a new wave-length range. “We will find millions of objects that have never been seen before” says Edward “Ned” Write, a scientific investigator at UCLA.
Some scientists hope that WISE could find a ninth planet to the solar system*. That sure sounds inspiring.
This last mission objective of the list is very important. JWST stands for James Webb Space Telescope, the next generation space telescope that will be sent into heliocentric orbit around 2014. By mapping the universe, scientists will choose specific objects or stellar formations to be further observed and investigated by the rest of NASA’s telescope fleet: Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and SOFIA airborne telescope.
Here’s a video made by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explaining what WISE will do:
I’m quite eager to hear about WISE’s first results, as they will probably shape the direction astronomical research will take during the next decade.
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*Since 2006, Pluto is not considered a Planet. It has been reclassified as a Dwarf Planet, along with Ceres, Haumea, Makemake and Eris.
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