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$70 million CU-Boulder Instrument Headed for Hubble Space Telescope in October
Astronomers will use a $70 million instrument
designed by the University of Colorado
at Boulder now set for installation on
the Hubble Space Telescope in mid-October
to probe the “fossil record” of
gases in the early universe for clues to
the formation and evolution of galaxies,
stars and planets.
The telephone-booth-sized instrument known
as the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or
COS, should help scientists better understand
the “cosmic web” of material
believed to permeate the universe, said
CU-Boulder Professor James Green, COS science
team leader. COS will gather information
from ultraviolet light emanating from distant
objects, allowing scientists to look back
in time and space and reconstruct the physical
condition and evolution of the early universe,
said Green.
Light traveling from quasars billions
of light-years away is altered as it passes
through the material between galaxies,
allowing astronomers to see fingerprints
of different gases, said Green of CU-Boulder’s
Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. By
choosing hundreds of targets in many directions,
the team can build up a picture of the
way matter is organized in the universe.
The spectrograph will break light into
its individual components -- similar to
the way raindrops break sunlight into the
colors of the rainbow -- revealing information
about the temperature, density, velocity,
distance and chemical composition of galaxies,
stars and gas clouds. COS will be able
to peer back in time to 10 billion years
ago when the first galaxies and chemical
elements were forming, Green said.
The COS team will use distant quasars
as “lighthouses” to track light
as it passes through the cosmic web, believed
to be made up of long, narrow filaments
of galaxies and intergalactic gas separated
by enormous voids. Astrophysicists
have theorized that a single cosmic web
filament may stretch for hundreds of millions
of light-years, an eye-popping length considering
a single light-year is about 5.9 trillion
miles.
Light passing through cosmic web material
illuminates fingerprints of elements like
carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron, the building
blocks of life that were made billions
of years ago inside young, hot stars
The final NASA Hubble repair mission is
slated to launch from Cape Kennedy, Fla.,
on October 10. Astronauts will install
COS and a wide-field camera and attempt
to repair two ailing instruments on the
orbiting telescope.
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