On a cloudy Hawaiian night on the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in the Pacific, 11 people watched as the largest fully operational telescope in the world pointed toward the evening sky.
The instrument created by the team of researchers, astronomers and graduate students took its first picture of a celestial object – a bright star.
“Everyone started cheering and clapping,” said Kristin Kulas, a UCLA graduate student who worked on the project. “This would have been unimpressive to most people. But to us who had been working on it for so long, it was great to be able to see that first image.”
MOSFIRE, which stands for Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infrared Exploration, is an instrument attached to the back of the Keck I telescope, one of the largest fully operational telescopes in the world which is co-owned by UCLA and Caltech. The instrument is one of the most advanced of its kind, detecting infrared light from distant galaxies and enabling researchers to view up to 46 galaxies simultaneously.
The MOSFIRE team has worked on this project for seven years under Ian McLean, the overall principle investigator and spokesperson for the project and vice chair of the astronomy division in the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy. The project, which cost about $14 million, was funded by the National Science Foundation and by astronomy benefactors Gordon and Betty Moore.
MOSFIRE will allow researchers to study populations of young galaxies and stars. Because dozens of galaxies can be displayed at a time, scientists can more effectively learn about how galaxies and other celestial objects form and evolve as a group, said Gregory Mace, a fourth-year graduate student researcher who worked with the MOSFIRE team.
The instrument can be applied to all kinds of science, from researching the solar system to the most distant galaxies in the universe, said McLean, who is also the director of the Infrared Laboratory for Astrophysics at UCLA.
Weighing five tons, the MOSFIRE instrument has more than 1,000 different components inside its 2-meter cylindrical frame. Each mechanism is powered separately and runs on its own motor.
MOSFIRE is different from other astronomy tools because it contains both a camera and a spectrometer, whereas other instruments do not contain both of these elements inside. The wide-field infrared camera detects infrared light emitted from distant galaxies.
The spectrometer then splits the camera’s image and isolates each galaxy, narrowing down the field of view to allow scientists to observe nearly 50 galaxies at a time.
As light from distant galaxies approaches the Earth, its wavelengths get longer, shifting its light from visible to infrared, McLean said. This phenomena is due to the expansion of the universe, he added.
Infrared light, unlike visible light, can also penetrate through cosmic dust. This is particularly useful because infrared cameras, such as the one in MOSFIRE, are still able to detect the light.
“The light from those galaxies has taken, literally, billions of years to get here,” McLean said. “We are seeing those galaxies as they were 10 billion years ago when the light left them. … We call (MOSFIRE) a time machine because we’re looking back in time to the age when these galaxies first formed.”
Yet, projects like MOSFIRE can also have a greater significance by allowing scientists to study how humans originated before life on earth.
McLean said that in the Big Bang origin of the universe, only the elements hydrogen and helium were formed in any significant quantity.
Other elements needed to make a human being, such as carbon and nitrogen, were later formed in nuclear reactions in stars that died and exploded as supernovas.
“We want to know a lot about where we came from,” Mace said. “To understand where we come from, we need to understand where the whole universe comes from.”
Although MOSFIRE was developed by researchers from UCLA, UC Santa Cruz and Caltech, it will be available for use by all University of California campuses, Caltech, NASA, University of Hawaii and
the National Science Foundation.
NASA’s involvement allows MOSFIRE to be utilized by the entire community of astronomers and researchers, McLean said.
“We’ve opened up a new regime of observing that wasn’t available to the community before,” said Kulas.
Article source: http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/04/ucla_astronomers_utilize_mosfire_to_study_early_distant_galaxies
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distant galaxies,
Kristin Kulas,
Ian McLean,
infrared light,
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