Results from the first major science papers from the Herschel Satellite were released this week at a conference in Holland. Launched almost a year ago on the same rocket as Planck, Herschel is an infrared and sub-millimeter telescope, which lets it see not only the stars that generate the visible light we see with our eyes and ordinary cameras, but also the gas and dust that absorb and re-radiate that light. That gas and dust carries information about both the birth and death of stars: the detritus of exploding stars pollutes the interstellar medium, which eventually condenses out to form new generations of stars. On larger scales, Herschel’s observations let us trace the evolution of entire galaxies, the most important tracers of large-scale structure, formed from seeds laid down somehow in the first instants of the Universe (and, bringing it all back to cosmology, which are viewed by Planck in a much earlier form).
My Imperial colleagues and Herschel scientists Dave Clements and Brian O’Halloran discuss the results in much more detail over on the Herschel mission blog, or you can keep more up to date on twitter. But I’ll just steal some of their bandwidth and show some pretty pictures.
Most of the dots in this picture are one of those distant galaxies, lit up in the infrared due to its once and future stars:
Image courtesy ESA/ATLAS Consortium
Closer to home, this is selection of star-forming regions, turbulent filaments of gas and dust:
Image courtesy ESA/Hi-GAL Consortium
Not coincidentally, Imperial’s Michael Rowan-Robinson, who has been doing infrared astronomy for several decades, appeared on BBC radio 4’s wonderful In Our Time this morning to discuss “The Cool Universe”: covering a century or so of infrared astronomy in forty-five minutes.
We on Planck won’t be coming out with any papers for quite a while. However, many members of the team gathered in Orsay, outside of Paris, this week, to discuss the progress of the observations (and our analyses) and, crucially, to start talking in more detail about the actual papers that we’ll be writing over the next few years. More generally, Planck is doing pretty well. It came out first in NASA’s latest round of evaluations (which is a significant achievement for a mission primarily run by ESA), and which we hope will also give further impetus to keep funds flowing in the UK. This is especially important as the length of the Planck mission is likely to be almost doubled, allowing us to extract even more science than we originally hoped.
I can’t say much more, except that we’ve got a lot of — very exciting — work ahead of us.