Astronomy - Thermo-camera sees first light - Provided by ESO
This is a story I should have blogged about last month when it was a little fresher, but better late than never. Anyway, LABOCA is the Large Bolometer Camera on the APEX submillimeter telescope. It isn't a teeny-tiny telescope, it's one that collects light with submillimeter wavelengths. That's somewhere between the radio and microwave parts of the spectrum, in one of the atmospheric windows where light can actually reach the ground from space (the two best ones are the optical and the radio).
So why observe at these wavelengths? What do you see? First of all, you see really cold things. Thermal cameras you see on TV in COPS or in movies like PREDATOR operate in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum, where things at Earth-like temperatures of 300 degrees Kelvin (a warm, sunny day) radiate the most (this is called "blackbody radiation" and is a consequence of having heat energy).
Most parts of space are not so close to a warm star like our sun. Vast interstellar clouds are quite cold, and these are the raw material for new stars to form from. Often the stellar collapse occurs deep inside these clouds behind so much gas and dust that they can only be studied at far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths. Stars heat the dust in the clouds, not too much, and all their young energy only leaks out, reprocessed, into longer wavelength photons.
In particular, if we want to study star formation in the universe as a whole, and study how the fist galaxies formed and assembled, we need to study the universe at submillimeter wavelengths. This is true at high redshifts, where the far-infrared light gets redshifted into the submillimeter. The related issues of galaxy formation and the star formation history of the universe are among the most fundamental and not yet solved questions facing astronomers.
LABOCA on APEX represents a significant improvement. Submillimeter observations are difficult, both from a technology standpoint and an atmospheric window standpoint. Watch for results from this new camera/telescope combination to make a major contribution to our understanding.