WISE gifts from the universe

(Good News Gazette) NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been hard at work since it was launched into orbit in December, 2009 and on January 14th began scanning the beauty of the entire sky in infrared light. It has since sent back more than a quarter of a million raw, infrared images ranging from comets and asteroids to star-forming clouds and galaxies.

This infrared WISE image shows a star-forming cloud teeming with gas, dust and massive newborn stars. The inset reveals the very center of the cloud, a cluster of stars called NGC 3603. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

On Wednesday, NASA revealed four new, processed images to provide a sample of the mission's targets. "We've got a candy store of images coming down from space," said Edward Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator for WISE. "Everyone has their favorite flavors, and we've got them all."

"WISE has worked superbly," said NASA's Ed Weiler. "These first images are proving the spacecraft's secondary mission of helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as critically important as its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared."

One image shows a bright and choppy star-forming region called NGC 3603, lying 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. This star-forming factory is churning out batches of new stars, some of which are monstrously massive and hotter than the sun. The hot stars warm the surrounding dust clouds, causing them to glow at infrared wavelengths.

WISE will see hundreds of similar star-making regions in our galaxy, helping astronomers piece together a picture of how stars are born. The observations also provide an important link to understanding star formation in distant galaxies.

Another image shows the beauty of a comet called Siding Spring. As the comet parades toward the sun, it sheds dust that glows in infrared light visible to WISE. The comet's tail, which stretches about 10 million miles, looks like a streak of red paint. A bright star appears below it in blue.

Comet Siding Spring appears to streak across the sky like a superhero in this new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The comet, also known as C/2007 Q3, was discovered in 2007 by observers in Australia. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Traveling farther out from our Milky Way, the third new image shows our nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda spiral galaxy. Andromeda is a bit bigger than our Milky Way and about 2.5 million light-years away. The new picture highlights WISE's wide field of view -- it covers an area larger than 100 full moons and even shows other smaller galaxies near Andromeda, all belonging to our "local group" of more than about 50 galaxies. WISE will capture the entire local group.

The immense Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, is captured in full in this new image. The mosaic covers an area equivalent to more than 100 full moons. Blue highlights mature stars, while yellow and red show dust heated by newborn, massive stars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The fourth WISE picture is even farther out, in a region of hundreds of galaxies all bound together into one family. Called the Fornax cluster, these galaxies are 60 million light-years from Earth. The mission's infrared views reveal both stagnant and active galaxies, providing a census of data on an entire galactic community.

This dense cluster of galaxies, called Fornax because of its location in a constellation of the same name, is 60 million light-years from Earth, and is one of the closest galaxy clusters to the Milky Way. Clusters are large families of galaxies that are gravitationally bound together, containing enough matter to pull even distant galaxies toward them. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

"All these pictures tell a story about our dusty origins and destiny," said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE sees dusty comets and rocky asteroids tracing the formation and evolution of our solar system. We can map thousands of forming and dying solar systems across our entire galaxy. We can see patterns of star formation across other galaxies, and waves of star-bursting galaxies in clusters millions of light years away."

WISE discovered its first near-Earth asteroid on Jan. 12, and first comet on Jan. 22. Other mission targets include comets, asteroids and cool stars called brown dwarfs. The mission will scan the sky one-and-a-half times by October. At that point, the frozen coolant needed to chill its instruments will be depleted.