What is WIRE?
WIRE is a 30-cm infrared telescope designed to pick starburst galaxies out of the crowd. It will be able to see typical starburst galaxies out to a distance of 3-5 billion light years. Thus, WIRE will help to determine starburst evolutionary history during the past few billion years or so. WIRE will be able to determine whether starburst galaxies do in fact represent the main source of all stars that we see around us today. WIRE will also be able to determine the odds that our own Sun formed in a burst of star-formation within the Milky Way, some 4.6 billion years ago.
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This is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Deep Field Image in Infrared. HST has uncovered the faintest galaxies ever seen. Astronomers believe some of these galaxies could be over 12 billion light-years away, making them the farthest objects ever seen. If these galaxies are 12 billion years old, they must have formed very quickly, but how? |
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This is an image of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way was formed almost 10 billion years ago. Was it formed in a giant burst of star-formation? WIRE will help us to find the answer. We will learn how the universe evolved, including the formation of our own galaxy. |
WIRE will also see ultraluminous starbursts far back into the early universe. Studies with the Hubble Space Telescope and the giant Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii have begun to reveal the star-formation history of the early universe. These telescopes have taken pictures that reveal a myriad of small, irregular-shaped galaxies that appear to be undergoing bursts of star-formation. The colors and the energy sources of these small galaxies imply that these big telescopes are seeing galaxies form from smaller "chunks".
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This is Galaxy NGC 4088. It is a spiral galaxy that is also undergoing a burst of star formation. |
Is that all of the picture? We don't know yet. The problem is that the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Telescopes can only see old stars or the minority of young stars that are visible at the edges of the clouds from which they formed. These telescopes may be seeing mainly smallish galaxies because those are the types of starburst galaxies that emit the most visible and ultraviolet light out of their star-forming clouds. A large fraction of the stars that formed in the early Universe may be in much bigger starbursts, ones that do not stand out in the images taken with big visible-light telescopes. WIRE will be able to find out if the old populations that are observed in modern galaxies originated in huge bursts of star-formation.
Also see What is WIRE?
Last Updated: 12/2/98
