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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (33071)	12/19/2003 2:49:53 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Telescope's New Pics Rival Hubble The final member of a quartet of space telescopes designed to peer deep into the universe has sent back its first images, and they rival those from the Hubble Space Telescope. The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, now named the Spitzer Space Telescope, gives astronomers a powerful tool for hunting galaxies and other celestial objects that formed relatively soon after the Big Bang explosion that brought our universe into existence. These ancient objects are now so far away that their light has shifted into the cool, long-wavelength realm of infrared radiation, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum stretching from about 1 micron to 200 microns. Visible light, in comparison, is between 0.4 and 0.7 microns; X-ray and gamma-ray radiation far shorter. While the other Great Observatories have probed the universe with visible light (Hubble Space Telescope), gamma rays (Compton Gamma Ray Observatory) and X-rays (Chandra X-ray Observatory), the Spitzer Space Telescope observes the cosmos in the infrared. Spitzer's sensitive instruments allow it to sense infrared radiation, or heat, from the most distant, cold and dust-obscured celestial objects such as stellar dust discs that serve as planetary wombs. "NASA's newest Great Observatory is open for business, and it is beginning to take its place at the forefront of science," said NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science, Ed Weiler, on Thursday. "Like Hubble, Compton and Chandra, the new Spitzer Space Telescope will soon be making major discoveries, and, as these first images show, should excite the public with views of the cosmos like we've never had before." dsc.discovery.com Click on "See More of Spitzer's First Photographs" for a spectacular five part slide show. I particularly liked M81 exhibiting red spiral arms of stellar birth. JMO lurqer