- Astronomers shared a background of images of galaxies created from data from four now-withdrawn missions.
- Cosmic dust contains building materials to form stars, planets, and galaxies.
- “Understanding dust is an essential part of understanding our universe,” according to NASA.
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The universe is full of cosmic dust and astronomers are still discovering its role in the cosmos. Now, researchers have combined data from four withdrawn missions to show how dust clouds fill the space between galaxy stars, in new images shared by NASA on Thursday.
The researchers used images from the now-retired Herschel Space Observatory, a space telescope that operated from 2009 to 2013. The cold instruments in the infrared telescope were sensitive enough to detect wavelengths of light that the human eye it cannot, allowing astronomers to observe the heat of the cosmic. objects and directly map cold clouds of gas and dust.
The Andromeda Galaxy, or M31, at wavelengths of light in far infrared and radio. Part of the hydrogen gas (red) that traces the edge of Andromeda’s disk was extracted from intergalactic space, and part of it moved away from galaxies that merged with Andromeda long ago. ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech / C. Clark (STScI)
But while Herschel’s dust maps revealed complex structures of dust clouds, the limitations in the telescope’s design caused up to 30% of all light emitted by dust to be lost. To help fill these gaps, the researchers combined their observations with data from three other withdrawn missions: the European Space Agency’s Planck Observatory, along with NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite and cosmic background explorer.
“These improved images of Herschel show us that the dust ‘ecosystems’ of these galaxies are very dynamic,” said Christopher Clark, an astronomer at the Maryland Space Science Telescope Institute, who led the work to create the new images, in a statement.
Researchers captured images of the Andromeda galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, and Magellanic clouds large and small, all about 3 million light-years from Earth.
The small Magellanic cloud is a satellite of the Milky Way, which contains about 3 billion stars. ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech / C. Clark (STScI)
In these stunning images, the red glow indicates the presence of hydrogen gas, the most common element in the universe. The warmest dust, which emanates when stars form and heat dust grains, is shown in blue.
In other images, strong winds from newborn stars removed the surrounding dust and gas, giving way to empty spaces. According to NASA, the green light around these bubbles indicates cold dust piled up by this stellar wind.
The galaxy Triangulum, or M33, is shown here in wavelengths of far infrared light and radio. ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech / GBT / VLA / IRAM / C. Clark (STScI)
“Understanding the dust is an essential part of understanding our universe,” NASA said in a press release on Thursday.
The cosmic dust that accumulates in galaxies has many of the essential chemical elements to form stars, planets, galaxies, and life as we know it. These dust grains can also reveal something about their cosmic environment, as they are constantly shaped by exploding stars, stellar winds, and the effects of gravity.