Space Telescope Captures Far Stars

Infrared Penetrates Dust, Reveals Objects Never Before Seen

(CBS/AP)  NASA has unveiled the first views from its space infrared telescope, a super-cooled orbiting observatory that can look through obscuring dust to capture images never before seen, and also named it the Spitzer Space Telescope in honor of a famed astronomer.

The new telescope, a $670 million project launched last August, is able to detect extremely faint waves of infrared radiation, or heat, allowing astronomers to peer for the first time 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, California, and the project scientist for the Spitzer, said Thursday at a news conference.

Excited scientists also presented quick-look data showing the unmistakable presence of organic molecules — the building blocks of life — in a galaxy more than 3 billion light years away, reports CBS News Space Consultant Bill Harwood. Those molecules were present at the same time life was evolving on Earth, strengthening the belief such compounds may be commonplace across the cosmos.

"That's a tremendous result," said James Houck, a principal investigator from Cornell University, especially since it took the new telescope just 14 minutes to collect the data.

"What are we going to be able to accomplish in five years?" Houck asked. "We're going to be able to see things that make this look like ho hum. ... We can expect a flood of discovery over the next five years. A flood."

"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," said Giovanni Fazio, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a Spitzer researcher.

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe announced the new telescope was named for Lyman Spitzer Jr., a Princeton University astronomer who proposed in 1946, long before the first orbital rocket, that the nation put telescopes into space, above the obscuring effects of the atmosphere. Spitzer was a leader in efforts to persuade Congress to pay for a fleet of orbiting telescopes and he played a major role in the 1990 launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Among the first views from the Spitzer:

• 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 in 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.
  
  
• 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, but the Spitzer sees to the comets glowing core.

John N. Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey 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."

The widow, children and grandchildren of Lyman Spitzer, new telescope's namesake, were present Thursday at a news conference where the name of the orbiting observatory was announced.

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. Spitzer died in 1997 at the age of 83.

The new telescope 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 are 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.

Virtually all objects in the universe emit some infrared, or heat, radiation. To detect it, the Spitzer is rather like a telescope within a vacuum jug. All the instruments detecting infrared are cooled by liquid helium and shielded from the heat-producing parts of the craft. The telescope was launched into an orbit that trails the Earth. This keeps it away from the planet's heat and enables the Spitzer to operate at a minus-450 degrees F, just 10 degrees above absolute zero.

The store of liquid helium, used at its present rate, is expected to last almost six years, officials said.

To achieve the ultra-low operating temperatures required to detect faint infrared radiation from deep space objects, reports Harwood, the telescope was boosted into an orbit around the sun that's slightly larger than Earth's.

It took two months for the telescope to cool down to operational temperatures and for scientists to check out and calibrate the instruments. Only then did they begin taking pictures.

"For me and, I think, all astronomers, today seems very much like a dream come true," Bahcall said. "It's clear that the telescope is performing beyond our expectations, we are getting more science than expected for fewer public dollars."