![]() The instruments aboard COBE, launched in 1989, looked back over 13 billion years to the early universe. Wright John Mather, chief scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, and NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team were jointly awarded the 2006 Gruber Cosmology Prize in August for their research confirming that our universe was born in a hot Big Bang Mather also shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. Science operations and data processing will take place at the JPL/Caltech Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. The cryogenic instrument will be built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft will be built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colo. Einstein later believed that to be a serious blunder, but it looks like he was correct, Wright said. WISE may be able to confirm the existence of dark energy, which scientists believe comprises more than 70 percent of the universe, and which Albert Einstein postulated in 1917. WISE is expected to produce more than 1 million images, from which hundreds of millions of space objects will be catalogued. WISE will also provide a complete inventory of dusty planet-forming discs around nearby stars, and find colliding galaxies that emit more light, specifically infrared light, than any other galaxies in the universe. "It's hard to find the most energetic galaxies if you don't know where to look," Eisenhardt said. Their dusty coats light up in infrared wavelengths. Galaxies in the distant, or early, universe were much brighter and dustier than our Milky Way galaxy. ![]() "We believe there are more brown dwarfs than stars in the universe, but we haven't found them because they are faint." "Brown dwarfs are lurking all around us," said Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for WISE and JPL. They can be detected best in the infrared, but even within the infrared are very difficult to detect. Brown dwarfs, the missing link between gas giant planets like Jupiter and small, low-mass stars, are failed stars about the size of Jupiter, with a much larger mass. ![]() ![]() Such extensive sky coverage means that the mission will find and catalogue all sorts of celestial eccentrics, including perhaps elusive brown dwarfs close to the Earth. "In addition, we will be able to study star-forming regions in nearby galaxies and star formation in distant galaxies." "Several have been detected, and we will be able to see many more in the Milky Way galaxy," Wright said. He added that proto-planetary discs around stars presumably condensing into a planetary system show up in the infrared. "Approximately two-thirds of nearby stars are too cool to be detected with visible light," Wright said. Wright said that 99 percent of the sky has not been observed yet with this kind of sensitivity, and that the survey should be able to find and observe at least 100 million galaxies and hundreds of nearby cool stars that are currently unknown. "I expect that what we find will be amazing. "This mission has incredible power for discovery," Wright said. Like a powerful set of night-vision goggles, WISE will survey the cosmos with infrared detectors 500 times more sensitive than those used in previous survey missions. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will manage the mission, with JPL's William Irace as project manager. (Ned) Wright, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, is WISE's principal investigator.
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