Scientists unveil their infrared sky

[Buster's Uncle]

Scientists unveil their infrared sky
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer produced this infrared view of the entire sky.

By Alan Boyle


The map was unveiled this week to mark the completion of WISE's infrared sky atlas, more than two years after the $320 million mission was launched. The telescope collected more than 2.7 million images in four infrared wavelengths and sent down more than 15 trillion bytes of data. The WISE spacecraft was shut down a year ago, after surveying the entire sky one and a half times, but scientists needed still more time to analyze and organize the data.

The images were combined into an atlas of more than 18,000 images. The atlas is accompanied by a catalog listing the infrared properties of more than 560 million individual objects, ranging from near-Earth asteroids to far-flung galaxies. Wednesday's release of the catalog meets the fundamental objective of a mission that was conceived in 1998.

"Today, WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community," UCLA astronomer Edward Wright, the mission's principal investigator, said in a NASA news release.

Over the past two years, WISE's science team has discovered the first examples of an ultra-cool class of stars known as Y-dwarfs, found the first Trojan asteroid to share Earth's orbit, and came up with a downsized estimate of the number of asteroids with a chance of threatening our planet. But the WISE team isn't done yet: Scientists will spend years poring over the data contained in the newly released catalog. And you can try your hand as well, although for most people, this gallery of WISE highlights should suffice.

Weekend goodies:

 WISE's all-sky image served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture quiz on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and it didn't take more than a few minutes for Eloid Ruiz to report what the picture showed. Eloid will be receiving a pair of 3-D glasses with my compliments (and an assist from Microsoft Research's World Wide Telescope project). Stay tuned next week for the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzler — and while you're waiting, tune in the Weekly Space Hangout, a week-in-review webcast hosted by Universe Today's Fraser Cain.

http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/16/10724418-scientists-unveil-their-infrared-sky