|
 July
20, 2000 -- Your home computer can become a portal to a wonderland
of stars, thanks to a massive release of images from an infrared
sky survey sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
"Any computer with a web browser can be transformed into
a desktop observatory," said Dr. Michael Skrutskie, of the
University of Massachusetts, principal investigator of the sky
survey, which has scanned the nighttime sky and produced an online
image potpourri of half a million galaxies and 162 million stars.
Right: The Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), one of the many
images released last week by the 2MASS survey.
"The general public can see a menagerie of objects in infrared
wavelengths that they couldn't see in any other way," said
project scientist Dr. Roc Cutri. The 1.9 million images would
fill 6,000 CD-ROMs, equivalent to 4,000 gigabytes or four terabytes
of computer hard disk space.
The images were gathered by the Two-Micron All Sky Survey
(2MASS), the most thorough census of stars ever made. The survey
detects infrared wavelengths that are beyond the red light in
the rainbow of visible colors. Infrared light penetrates the
gas and dust in our galaxy and is particularly effective for
detecting the heat of very cool objects not visible with optical
telescopes.
In order to cover the entire sky, the 2MASS survey uses two highly
automated, 51-inch (1.3-meter) diameter telescopes, one at Mount
Hopkins, Ariz., the other at the National Science Foundation's
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile.
Operations for 2MASS began in 1997. Its catalogs will
contain more than 300 million objects by the time observations
are concluded in 2001. Final processing of the data and release
to the public will be complete by 2003.
Already, 2MASS data have uncovered numerous stars with characteristics
so unique that astronomers had to revise a century-old classification
system of known types of stars.
Astronomers armed with 2MASS data also discovered the coolest
brown dwarfs, or failed stars, known to date. They also detected
previously unknown star clusters within, and galaxies beyond,
our own Milky Way, and have mapped new star-birth regions. In
the distant reaches of the universe, 2MASS discovered a new population
of dust-obscured active galaxies, quasars and super-massive black
holes.
Left: The Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104. Center:
The Tarantula Nebula, HII region 30 Doradus Right: The
Center of our Milky Way Galaxy. View
a sampler of more 2MASS images!
"The current release is based on a volume of data several
hundred times larger than that contained in the human genome,"
said Skrutskie. "Astronomers will become cosmic geneticists,
searching out patterns in these sky maps to decode the structure
and origin of the Milky Way and the surrounding nearby Universe."
The 2MASS project is a collaborative effort between the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Infrared Processing and Analysis
Center (IPAC) in Pasadena, Calif., operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) and the California Institute of Technology,
both in Pasadena. Cutri is affiliated with IPAC, which combines
and processes 2MASS images into usable data. The University of
Massachusetts was responsible for the development and construction
of the 2MASS telescopes and cameras and currently manages the
collection of survey data.
Part of NASA's Origins Program, 2MASS is funded by NASA's
Office of Space Science and the National Science Foundation.
2MASS results will benefit future Origins missions, including
the Space Infrared Telescope Facility and the Next Generation
Space Telescope, and will also help scientists plan observations
for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Stratospheric Observatory
for Infrared Astronomy. JPL manages the program for NASA's Office
of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of Caltech. |
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