Issue date: 2/4/04 Section: Sci/Tech

NASA´s new Spitzer Space Telescope has captured this stunning image of the Tarantual Nebula, a rich star-forming region also known as 30 Doradus, which is 170,000 lights years away. (Photo Courtesy of *NASA/JPL-Caltech/B. Brandl (Cornell & University of Leiden))

Scientists now have a new way to peer into the vast universe and explore the heavens. Astronomers have examined the cosmos in visible light, using the Hubble Space Telescope; in gamma rays, using the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory; in X-rays, using the Chandra X-ray Observatory; and now, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, they can scan the universe in the infrared.

NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope on Aug. 25, 2003, and its first observations were released on Dec. 18. Spitzer studies parts of the universe that cannot be observed using other telescopes. It senses infrared radiation, or heat, and allows scientists to investigate areas of the universe that could not previously be observed because they were distant, cold or cloaked in dust, according to NASA. Telescopes on Earth cannot detect infrared radiation from space because water vapor, carbon dioxide and oxygen molecules in Earth's atmosphere absorb a lot of the radiation.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly called the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, was named after Dr. Lyman Spitzer Jr. (1914-1997). Spitzer was a physicist at Yale, Columbia and Princeton universities and, in 1946, he put forward the idea that space telescopes would allow scientists to observe the universe in wavelengths of light that are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and cannot be observed from Earth, according to space.com.

"Every time you have a quantum jump in technology, there's a quantum jump in the knowledge of our universe," said Dr. Roland Allen of the A&M Department of Physics.

"We have had two giant jumps (that led to advances in astronomy). Galileo gave us the telescope, and Spitzer is the one who, by hard work, got us above the Earth's atmosphere."

The first observations of the Spitzer Space Telescope amazed scientists.

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