A recent highlight for all astronomers working on Herschel data was the first ever meeting of results presented to the scientific community at the Herschel First Results Symposium.
A recent highlight for all astronomers working on Herschel data was the first ever meeting of results presented to the scientific community at the Herschel First Results Symposium, which took place in May 2010, one year after the launch of Herschel.
The high resolution of Herschel images will allow us to determine the nature of cold sources detected by the Planck satellite.
Herschel was in the same rocket as the Planck satellite – an European mission designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background, the low level energy which pervades through space. The CMB is a relic of the Big Bang (it was formed when the Universe was at about 3000 degrees hot and only 400,000 years old, but we still see it traveling through space to our detectors today.
Herschel ATLAS should detect about 500 galaxies which are known as active because they have a bright core, harbouring massive black holes.
This image is an artist's impression of an active galaxy. The centres of these galaxies are known to be extremely bright, emitting lots of energetic energy at X-rays.
The Herschel ATLAS is designed to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and will observe galaxies from the nearby Universe out to redshifts of 3 to 4, when the Universe was only a few billion years old.
This image shows our entire very first dataset taken with Herschel, set into a computer simulation of the structure of dark matter in the Universe. The Herschel data shows a small area of sky which is about 4 x 4 degrees across.
Distant galaxies are sometimes lensed by a massive object between us and the galaxy, allowing us to view these distant galaxies as they were billions of years ago.
This image is taken by the Hubble Space Telescope showing visible light from stars. This is a very famous cluster called Abel 2218. Einstein predicted an effect called "gravitational lensing" in the early 20th century, where the light from background galaxies is bent and magnified by a massive object in front of it, similar to light being magnified by a normal glass lens.
Although this is an extra-galactic survey, we still expect to see some Galactic material in some parts of the sky, getting in the way of the distant galaxies!
This image is a zoomed in region of our very first dataset taken with Herschel. It shows a small area of sky where each galaxy appears as just a pinprick but its brightness allows astronomers to determine how quickly it is forming stars. Roughly speaking, the brighter the galaxy the more stars it is forming.
We will detect hundreds and thousands of galaxies in the nearby Universe providing the first extensive census of dust and hidden star formation in the Universe today.
This image of some nearby galaxies shows the power of Herschel ATLAS in finding local objects. We can see spiral arms in galaxies but we are not looking at stars here, but rather the dust which is heated up by the stars. The bright blue colours are showing regions which are warmer because they are being heated up by stars.
Some of the Herschel ATLAS team were lucky enough to take part in an exhibition of Herschel in the Antenna Gallery of the Science Museum. We spent three days talking to thousands of members of the public who were able to get a chance to ask members of the ATLAS team anything and everything about Herschel and astronomy. Dr Haley Gomez, Dr Chris Peason and Dr Dave Clements of ATLAS got to show off a scale model of the Herschel telescope which was a favourite with the kids! We really enjoyed it and thanks to the Science Museum for organising such a great few days.
The first ever set of Herschel science papers have been published in a special issue of the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. More than 150 papers were published and are freely available on the Astronomy & Astrophysics Herschel Special Issue website, and eight of these were published by the Herschel ATLAS team on our first "small" dataset alone.
