From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Mon Jan 06 2003 - 17:59:42 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 5:07 PM
To: ljk4_at_msn.com
Subject: Astronomers Find a Hero
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Paul Morledge (818) 354-0850
Jane Platt (818) 354-0880
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Image Advisory: 2003-003 January 6, 2003
Astronomers Find a Hero
Heroes are usually confined to comic books and movies, but as the
saying goes, we all need one. So astronomers have turned to the deep,
dark cosmos to find their heroic figure -- the "Hyper Extremely Red
Object," or "Hero."
At the American Astronomical Society winter meeting in Seattle today,
an astronomer from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena
reports the discovery of a Hero near the radio galaxy 53W002, more
than 10 billion light years away. This marks the first time a Hero has
been found near a radio galaxy, suggesting that radio galaxies --
which are optically dim but have strong radio emissions -- may provide
a guidepost for scouting out other Hero objects.
"Hero objects are intriguing. Like comic book heroes, they travel
really fast -- almost at the speed of light. They are virtually
invisible to our eyes and they are very mysterious. Most importantly,
this type of Hero may hold a key for understanding how the first
galaxies formed and evolved in the universe," said Dr. Myungshin Im, a
staff research scientist at the Space Infrared Telescope Facility
Science Center, located at Caltech.
So far, the astronomical version of a hero has taken on the unassuming
guise of a small, glowing, red patch in deep space. More advanced
infrared telescopes like NASA's Space Infrared Telescope Facility,
managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and
launching in spring 2003, may, among other things, lift this red veil
and reveal these remote objects for what they really are -- quite
possibly the universe's earliest stars and galaxies.
Due to expansion of the universe after the Big Bang, a distant object
in the universe races away from us so fast that any visible light from
it "redshifts" -- in other words, a light source becomes redder when
it recedes from observers on Earth, and, conversely, bluer when it
approaches. So when a visible light source moves away from us at
nearly the speed of light, it often appears in infrared wavelengths.
Big Bang theory also implies that the farther away an object is, the
faster it moves away from us.
53W002_HERO1, the designation for the newly found Hero, is so far away
and moves so fast it appears as a faint infrared source. In fact, it
took two powerful telescopes equipped with infrared cameras to spot it
in the deep sky. Im discovered 53W002_HERO1 from images taken by the
near-infrared camera and multi-object spectrometer on NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope and the cooled infrared spectrograph and camera
attached to the Subaru 8-meter (26-feet) telescope atop Mauna Kea in
Hawaii. Dr. Toru Yamada and collaborators at the National Astronomical
Observatory of Japan provided Im with the Subaru data.
The more distant a cosmic object is, the further in the past we see
it. But for Im and colleagues to glean information about the early
universe from 53W002_HERO1, they first need to determine its intrinsic
color -- that is, how would this astronomical hero appear to a human
observer nearby?
It could be red, indicating either dust-obscured galaxies cocooning
intense star formation, or older galaxies filled with an overabundance
of elderly, reddish stars, both of which would lie about 10 billion
light-years away. If the former condition exists, astronomers will
appreciate the degree to which dust hid star formation during that
epoch. However, if the latter holds then scientists can trace back to
a time when a significant population of stars were born.
Another possibility is that a Hero might really be blue -- a very
young galaxy populated with fresh, super-hot blue stars at a distant
13 to 14 billion light years. In this instance, we may be witnessing
the formation of the universe's very first galaxies.
To determine whether 53W002_HERO1 is intrinsically red or blue, Im and
his colleagues will peer at these mysterious objects in the redder
part of infrared, a feat that requires a view from above Earth's
infrared-absorbing atmosphere. This will be accomplished with the
Space Infrared Telescope Facility.
Images of 53W002_HERO1 are online at
http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/myung/hero.html
More information on the Space Infrared Telescope Facility is available
at http://sirtf.caltech.edu http://sirtf.caltech.edu/ . The Jet
Propulsion Laboratory is a division of Caltech.
-end-
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