Comet’s 10 Million-Mile Tail Lights Up in Infrared

NASA%u2019s new infrared telescope has released its first images.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer has returned more than 250,000 raw images. To celebrate its performance thus far, NASA selected four of them for processing and publication.

Above, you can see the comet, Siding Spring, which was discovered in 2007 by Australian observers. Its 10 million-mile-long tail is made of glowing dust pushed away from its nucleus by the solar wind.

WISE launched on Dec. 14, 2009 and took in its first starlight at the end of the month. The telescope is intended to survey the entire sky looking for cosmic oddities. The mission will also provide better data on the average size of asteroids in the solar system, which will refine scientists%u2019 estimates of how often a dangerous near-Earth object hits the Earth.

WISE is one of three space-based telescopes that observe in the infrared. NASA%u2019s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory also look at the longer wavelength side of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because the longer light waves travel more effectively through fine particles, the infrared is best for observing dusty regions.

In the image below, we see the Andromeda galaxy%u2019s dusty spiral arms. WISE has four detectors in the infrared spectrum, which measure light with wavelengths of 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 microns. By using only the detectors that can measure the longest wavelengths, scientists can generate images like the one below, which shows just the dusty arms of the galaxy, which are heated by young stars.

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

See Also:

• New NASA Sky Mapper to Hunt Stars, Galaxies, Near-Earth Asteroids
• Spitzer Spots Swirling Stars at the Center of the Galaxy
• Violent Star-Forming Nebula Caught by Spitzer Telescope
• Strange Eye-Shaped Galaxy Has Black-Hole Iris
• Infrared Telescope Warms Up to Star-Forming Cloud

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal%u2019s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

via wired.com

Part of the first major batch of images released from NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission: New comet, in infrared.

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