Staying close to home in Cardiff, I should point out for those who were previously unaware, that our very own Matt Griffin had another career before becoming Principal Investigator for the SPIRE instrument on Herschel. His most famous acting role was as the seedy landlord, Rigsby, in the 1970s situation comedy Rising Damp.
Professor Matt Griffin
Rigsby
It’s a bit lower key than I’d hoped because of Wednesday’s catastrophic announcements, but some of the first science results from Herschel are now available online. I’ve taken most of the following text from our own Herschel Outreach site here at Cardiff University.
Herschel scientists are currently meeting in Madrid to present the results from the Science Demonstration Phase of the Herschel mission. This is the phase of the mission where the satellite and its instruments are stretched to their full capabilities. A number of results involving the SPIRE instrument and astronomers from the UK have been presented. Professor Matt Griffin, SPIRE Principal Investigator, said
The Herschel Science Demonstration meeting is what the SPIRE team has been looking forward to since the start of the project more than a decade ago, and the results being presented are even better than we dared hope before launch. Not only are the observatory and the instrument working very well, but it is already clear that in this unexplored region of the spectrum, the Universe is even more interesting than we thought.
As well as the images presented below, more scientific results are being presented at the meeting in Madrid, some of which will be shown here in due course. I’ll just show you a quick taster of a couple of the things Cardiff astronomers are looking at.
A region of the Virgo cluster as seen in optical light by Sloan Digital Sky Survey (left) and in far-infrared by SPIRE 250m image Image credit: SDSS (left), ESA/Herschel/HeViCS Key Project (right)
Above is a region of the Virgo cluster, a large cluster of galaxies around 50 million light-years from our galaxy. The left panel shows a region containing four galaxies in optical light, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, while the right panel shows the region as seen by SPIRE at 250mm. The galaxies in the Virgo cluster are kept together by their mutual gravitational attraction. However, the galaxies do move relative to each other, and when they pass close to each other they can pull gas and dust into clumps and streams which stretch between the galaxies. Dr Jonathan Davies, of Cardiff University, and Principle Investigator of the Herschel Virgo Cluster Survey, for which this image was taken, commented that “far-infrared observations such as this give us an unprecedented insight into the behaviour of gas and dust in galaxy clusters, and further observations should yield some very exciting results”. The area of emission above the galaxy NGC4435 is very faint as seen in optical light, but much brighter in the far-infrared as measured by SPIRE. Also notable from this region is the relative brightness of the galaxies NGC4406 and NGC4402. NGC4406 is a giant elliptical galaxy, and so very bright in the optical, but is almost invisible in the far-infrared. This shows that it has already used up the majority of its gas and dust in forming the stars.
SPIRE image of the GOODS-North region. Image credit: ESA/Herschel/HerMES Key Project
On the left is shown an area of sky called the “Great Observatory Origins Deep Survey” (GOODS), which has been observed by many telescopes at a range of wavelengths, and now by SPIRE in the far-infrared. It is an area of sky devoid of foreground objects, such as stars within our Galaxy, or any other nearby galaxies, and is a little larger than the area of the full moon as observed from Earth. The image is made from the three SPIRE bands, with red, green and blue corresponding to 500µm, 350µm and 250µm respectively. Every fuzzy blob in this image is a very distant galaxy, seen as they were 3—10 billion years ago when the star formation was very widely spread throughout the Universe. Dr Seb Oliver, of University of Sussex and PI of the HERMES survey for which this image was taken, said
Seeing such stunning images after just 14 hours of observations gives us high expectations for the full length observations over much larger regions of the Universe. This will give us a much clearer idea of how star formation has progressed throughout the history of the Universe.” The redder objects are either more distant, as the expansion of the Universe has stretched, the light more since it was emitted by the galaxy, or much cooler than the bluer galaxies. This is the first time much of the Cosmic Infrared Background, discovered in the 1990s, has been resolved into the individual galaxies. Studying these galaxies at this early stage of the Universe will allow astronomers to test their models of star and galaxy formation.
I’d add that although this is probably the least photogenic of the images just released, it’s the sort of thing that fascinates those of us of a statistical persuasion because it’s such a challenge to wring as much science as possible from data that test the limits of the instrument’s capabilities. However it takes a great deal of time and detailed analysis to do justice to the quantity and quality of the data that’s coming in from Herschel. If our grants get cut then we’ll find it very difficult to deliver this science in a timely fashion, and that would be a ridiculous state of affairs given the investment that’s already gone in to building this marvellous observatory.
10.45am. I came in this morning determined to get on with some work to distract my attention from the looming announcement of budget cuts from the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC). I was up nearly all night worrying about the future, especially for the current generation of postdocs whose careers I’m pretty sure are going to sacrificed in large numbers to balance the books. It reminded me a bit about a poem I posted a while ago: I could not sleep for thinking of the Sky STFC.
Anyway, I’ve spent over an hour trying to write one paragraph of the paper I’m trying to finish and I can’t settle so I thought I’d start a post, with the intention of updating it as the day goes on, the picture gets a bit clearer, and I become increasingly suicidal.
The actual announcement of the result of the prioritisation exercise will appear this afternoon on the STFC website here under the heading
STFC: Investing in the Future
Who said these guys don’t have a sense of humour? What’s underneath is currently completely blank. Hang on, they might have put the result up early in that case…
Most of the blogs and tweets I follow – at least those emanating from this side of the Atlantic – are about this today, so if you’d like to keep up here are some useful links:
Paul Crowther at Sheffield has kept up with all the ongoings and downturnings at STFC and you can expect him to understand it better and quicker than the rest of us here.
There’s a very good (and nearly anonymous) post about all this on the blog To Left of Centre.
The e-astronomer (Andy Lawrence at the ROE) has written about this and a lot of important people have commented on it.
Rob Simpson, a PhD student here in Cardiff, is probably expressing the fears of many younger researchers as is Sarah Kendrew who gives a postdoc perspective.
There’s a list of things astronomical that are probably about to eat the dirt at this website. My bet is that everything on their list will go, plus more. The reason is that most of the things at the bottom of the prioritisation exercise are actually fairly cheap, so just closing a few won’t plug the gap. As a colleague of mine said the other day, “It’s a big shit sandwich, and we all have to take a bite.”
11.15am. If the phrase “going forward” appears anywhere on the STFC announcement page, then I won’t be responsible for my actions…
11.50am. WICKET! Prince c Collingwood b Swann 45. Oh sorry. Wrong blog.
12.08pm. Incoming transatlantic link from the Starving Economist, from whose page I’ve pulled the following comment:
So I’d almost forgotten that other countries are out there, facing the Great Recession as well, and making really stupid decisions in the face of it. IMHO one example of blatant incompetence in an economic sense is being perpetrated by none other than the UK. We kind of look up to them, don’t we? It’s the accent or something. But they are busy tossing some of their world-renowned science, and much of their past investment in such, out the door rather than restructure some of their government funding. Talk about inertia. Their astronomy program appears to be particularly hard-hit. Interesting way to close 2009, the International Year of Astronomy.
I couldn’t agree more. It also reminded that I haven’t made enough of the irony that this is indeed the International Year of Astronomy. For a lot of people it will be the last year they’ll be doing astronomy.
12.25pm. Meanwhile, our man in Madrid, Matt Griffin has been wowing the audience with some of the new results from Herschel. I hope to be able to post a few of them later when the official workshop results go live.
12.45pm. STFC operatives have been phoning project leaders this morning to tell them the bad news. Our head of school, Walter Gear, has got his phone call telling him that our attempt to resurrect Clover will not be funded. Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected…
13.15pm. It’s tea-time in sunny South Africa (with the home side at 159-4) but here in Blighty it’s the long dark lunch break of the soul, waiting for news of the inevitable.
13.30pm. Half an hour to go. Most of the astronomers in the department have now left to travel to Madrid for the big workshop starting tomorrow. They tell me the new results probably won’t be available for public consumption until Friday (18th December). Nothing to sugar the pill, then.
13.55pm. I’m not often right, but I was wrong again. I’ve just noticed that there is already an ESA press release that includes this stunning image of a star-forming region in the constellation of Aquila made using both PACS and SPIRE observations. This is just a first look at part of an extended survey of stellar nurseries that Herschel will be undertaking over the forthcoming months.
14.00pm. And there were are, right on cue. Here is the announcement. As expected, there is a ridiculous attempt to put a positive spin on it all, but you will find immediately, sigh, another 10% cut in research grants to universities (on top of the 25% we already had) to reduce the amount of “exploitation”, plus 25% cuts in the number of PhD students and fellowships “mirroring the overall reduction in the programme”. I read that as meaning that STFC wants, in the long term, about 25% of the astronomers in the UK to go somewhere else and, preferably, never come back.
I’ll post more when I’ve read the details.
14.10pm. So here’s a quick summary of what projects will be funded in (ground-based) astronomy:
Advanced LIGO, JCMT (to 2012), Gemini (until end 2012), ING (to 2012), KMOS, VISTA, Dark Energy Survey, E-ELT R&D, SKA R&D, SuperWASP, e-Merlin, Zeplin III; Total cost of £87m over 5 years
(the big surprise to me in there is e-Merlin, which I thought would get the chop) and what won’t
Auger, Inverse Square Law, ROSA, ALMA regional centre, JIVE, Liverpool Telescope, UKIRT. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £16m. Total savings of £29m over 5 years
And on the space side we have the lucky ones:
Aurora, GAIA, Herschel, JWST-MIRI, LISA Pathfinder, Rosetta, Planck, ExoMars, Hinode, Cosmic Vision, Solar Orbiter, Stereo, Swift, Bepi-Colombo; Total cost of £114m over 5 years
and the losers
Cassini, Cluster, SOHO, Venus Express, XMM. Additional reduction imposed on ongoing projects of £28m. Total Savings of £42m over 5 years
Note that both Aurora and Bepi-Colombo were both rated very low on scientific grounds but have been retained in the programme, presumably for political reasons.
However, the big downside for everyone is the cut in university grants for “exploitation” that I mentioned above. STFC wants to have lots of expensive facilities, but doesn’t want to fund the modest among of staff needed to actually get science out of them. The stupidity of this decision is made even more depressing by its inevitability.
Even the top-rated projects are getting cuts to their funding. It just shows how little thinking is going on about the actual science that STCF is supposed to be supporting. Isn’t it a more sensible strategy to do a few things well, rather than a lot of things poorly? It’s a mess.
14.38pm. From a Cardiff perspective this is nowhere near as bad as it could have been, but is still pretty dire. The primary activities for our current astronomy programme, Herschel and Planck, are both very high in the priority list and the relativity group is relieved to see ground-based gravitational wave research, including Advanced LIGO, at the highest priority. Moreover, it looks like what I feared most of all – an immediate clawback of existing grants with consequent immediate redundancies – is not going to happen, owing to what appears to be a last-minute injection of funds from RCUK. We’re still looking at cash cuts though, and we’re vulnerable because so much of our research income comes from STFC.
14.43pm. Not on the STFC webpage, but it appears that they are not going to support LOFAR-UK either.
15.05pm. If you want to read the full outcome of the prioritisation exercise, in terms of a batting order of projects, you can download it here. It includes a recommendation that the top funded (alpha-5) projects should get a 15% cut and those at the next leveldown (alpha-4) should get a 20% cut. However, things will probably turn out worse than that because those cuts were suggested on the basis that only those projects would be funded at all. As it turns out, some alpha-3 projects have made it through also, so the cuts to the higher-rated projects must be larger to compensate. Mustn’t they?
15.24pm. I note that STFC have decided to carry on their programme of outreach activities:
Ongoing support for public outreach and science communication, through continuance of our award schemes and Fellowships, and public engagement and communications, helping to ensure new generations of children are enthused and inspired by science, and encouraged to continue study in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.
..so we can kick them in the teeth when they’ve just started a scientific career.
15.30pm. Press release, from Unelected Minister for Science and Innovation, Strategic Defence Acquisition Reform, and Formula 1 Car Racing, Lord Drayson of Twitter. I quote:
… it has become clear to me that there are real tensions in having international science projects, large scientific facilities and UK grant giving roles within a single Research Council. It leads to grants being squeezed by increases in costs of the large international projects which are not solely within their control. I will work urgently with Professor Sterling, the STFC and the wider research community to find a better solution by the end of February 2010.
Is there a possibility that a light has gone on somewhere to the effect that something must be done to stop STFC killing University research? I hope so. If he can pull something out of the fire before March 2010, though, I’d be very impressed.
16.07pm. I may be clutching at straws here, but it is interesting to join the dots between Lord Drayon’s comment above and the following excerpt from the STFC announcement
discussions would be held in coming months with national and international partners, including universities, departments and project teams, on implementation of the investment strategy. This will include discussions with EPSRC and the University funding councils on the impact of these measures on physics departments in universities.
I doubt if EPSRC is going to come running to the rescue without a great deal of encouragement. However, taken together with the comment above by Lord Drayson, there’s at least a hint of a possibility that a way to protect grants might be found. Calling them “research” rather than “exploitation” grants would be a start…
16.18pm. Press statements from Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, President of the Institute of Physics here and Andy Fabian, President of the Royal Astronomical Society here.
17.08pm. I think that’s enough for the day. It hasn’t been good, but the nightmare scenario was that my own research grant would be terminated immediately and I’d have to break the news to my PDRA. At least that didn’t happen, not yet anyway. I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies. But I’m exhausted after sleeping so badly last night, so I think I’ll close this for now. Keep your comments coming if there’s anything significant I missed…
19.45pm Before I settle down with my gramophone records for the evening, I just thought I’d remind anyone not sufficiently depressed at the state of STFC that the drastic cuts announced today do not take account of whatever share of the £600 million “efficiency savings” announced in the budget has been allocated to them. It may look bad now, but it’s probably going to get worse. On that cheery note, I’m going to have a drink and listen to Mahler.
The next few days promise to be extremely interesting, although there is more than a hint of the Chinese Curse in that statement! Today is the day of our annual departmental Christmas Lunch. That’s not itself the subject of any kind of curse, but if last year’s is anything to go by it may take several days to recover from it. I’m preparing myself for it mentality as I write.
Tomorrow, however, 15th December, is the date of the next meeting of the Council of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. On their agenda is the programme of cuts that is proposed as a result of the recent prioritisation exercises initiated to try to find a way out of their ongoing funding crisis. This programme has been through various committees before reaching the Council and, if the Council accepts it, the plans will be unveiled at a press conference on Wednesday 16th (at 2pm) and those about to die will be informed immediately. I’ll try to post a summary on here as soon as I get the facts.
I don’t have any particular inside information who is going to get the chop, but rumour suggests that there will be cuts right across the board. I think it’s going to be very grim news indeed, especially because there is an additional £600 million of savings to be found over the next few years on top of the current shortfall. It’s bound to be a terrible Christmas for those about to find out their contracts are being axed, and no happy New Years for a while either.
I’m not privy to the Council discussions or to the recommendations that have been passed to them so it’s not my place to say what they should do. However, in the unlikely event that anyone from STFC Council is reading this, I hope he/she at least bears in mind that it is not – or at least it shouldn’t be – the job of the Council simply to rubber stamp everything that is passed before it. I wonder, though, if the current Council has the guts to pass a vote of no confidence in the STFC Executive? I doubt it, because there’s been no reason to have confidence in them for the past two years and no such motion has been carried.
Ironically, later in the week there’s going to be a big jamboree in Madrid, at which the initial results of the Science Demonstration Phase of Herschel will be announced. Quite a few of the Cardiff crowd are going along and will be presenting some of the wonderful things that they’ve been working on for the past few weeks. I’ve seen quite a lot of the data from the SPIRE instrument and it’s truly amazing. At least there’s some (infrared) light among the darkness. However, it’s all covered by an ESA press embargo until Wednesday…
OK, so it turns out I lied about not posting today. It’s not because I’m a dishonest professor, though. It’s just that I couldn’t resist drawing your attention to the new results that have just been released by the European Space Agency. To whet your appetite, have a shufty at this exquisite far infrared spectrum of the star VY Canis Majoris taken using the SPIRE instrument for which Cardiff is the lead institute.
VY Canis Majoris (VY CMa) is a red hypergiant, an enormous evolved star located in the constellation Canis Major. With a radius 2600 times that of the Sun, it is the largest known star and it is also one of the most luminous stars known. It is located about 4900 light years away from Earth, has a luminosity in excess of 100,000 solar luminosities, and a mass in the range 30-40 solar masses.
The shell of gas it has ejected displays a complex structure, the so-created circumstellar envelope is among the most remarkable chemical laboratories known in the universe, creating a rich set of organic and inorganic molecules and dust species. Through stellar winds, these inorganic and organic compounds are injected into the interstellar medium, from which new stars orbited by new planets may form. Most of the carbon supporting life on planet Earth was probably made by this kind of evolved star. VY CMa is close to the end of its life and could explode as a supernova at any time.
Spectroscopic results may be a bit less photogenic than pretty pictures, but they often yield much more physically relevant information than simple images. As I’ve mentioned before, it is in spectroscopy where we find the difference between astronomy and astrophysics (or, less politely, between stamp collecting and science). In this case the spectrum gives a detailed breakdown of the chemical mixture present in the matter ejected by this star.
You can find other stunning examples of Herschel’s infrared spectroscopic capabilities here and you can read more about the involvement of Cardiff astronomers in these stunning new science results on our own pages here.
There’s also a story on the BBC Website.
Well, this is blogging made easy. I’ve just cut-and-pasted the following item directly from the School’s news page with very few alterations, but it’s all done for a good reason, so please read on:
A leading member of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University, whose research helped create one of the most powerful and ambitious astronomical satellites ever made will feature in a two-part Radio 4 programme.
The Herschel Space Telescope is a two-part series to be aired on Radio 4 on Wednesday 18th November, 11:00-11:30am and Wednesday 25th November, 11:00-11:30am. BBC science reporter Jonathan Amos follows the engineers and scientists working on the SPIRE instrument for the European Space Agency’s Herschel satellite. Herschel is one of the most important missions in the history of European spaceflight and was launched successfully on May 14 this year.
The SPIRE instrument was built by an international team led by Professor Matt Griffin, School of Physics and Astronomy. The programme tells the story of the UK SPIRE team, including several members from Cardiff, as they prepared for the launch of Herschel and as the first results came in.
As well as Professor Griffin, other members of staff in the School of Physics and Astronomy who contributed to the project are also featured. They include: Professor Steve Eales, Dr Jon Davies, Dr Kate Isaak, and Dr Pete Hargrave as well as post-doctoral researchers Dr Jason Kirk, Dr Michael Pohlen, and Dr Luca Cortese.
Professor Matt Griffin
Herschel carries the biggest mirror ever sent to space and is already giving astronomers their best view yet of the Universe at far-infrared and sub-millimetre wavelengths. It can peer through obscuring clouds of dust to look at the early stages of star birth and galaxy formation; it can examine the composition and chemistry of comets and planetary atmospheres in the Solar System; and it is able to study the star-dust ejected by dying stars into interstellar space which forms the raw material for planets like the Earth.
Professor Griffin said: “With its big telescope and sophisticated and sensitive instruments, including SPIRE, Herschel is a very powerful observatory for many studies from our own solar system to the most distant galaxies. Already we can see that its results will reveal how stars like the Sun are forming in our own galaxy today, how planetary systems can develop from the dust and gas around young stars, and how the galaxies grew and evolved over cosmic time.
“Astronomers from Cardiff are at the forefront in making these exciting scientific discoveries – we are delighted that the work of Cardiff scientists will be featured in such an important radio programme.”
I should also point out that BBC Radio 4 programmes can be listened to online, and are available to download for a week after the broadcast from the BBC website (even to foreigners).
PS. I should also mention that today’s “Material World” (another Radio 4 programme) was a special edition from Cardiff University and also featured an astronomy item. If you missed it, or if you want to hear it again, you can listen to it here.
I note that the Herschel mission now has its own blog, so I no longer have to try to remember to put all the sexy images on here. However, at the end of a worrying week for UK astronomy, I thought it would be a good idea to put up one of the wonderful new infra-red images of the Milky Way just obtained from Herschel. This is the first composite colour picture made in “parallel mode”, i.e. by using the PACS and SPIRE instruments together. Together the two instruments cover a wavelength range from 70 to 500 microns. The resulting image uses red to represent the cooler long-wavelength emission (seen by SPIRE) and bluer colours show hotter areas. The region of active star formation shown is close to the Galactic plane; detailed images such as this, showing the intricate filamentary structure of the material in this stellar nursery, will help us to understand better how what the complex processes involved in stellar birth.
I’ve just noticed a post on another blog about the meeting of the Herschel ATLAS consortium that’s going on in Cardiff at the moment, so I thought I’d do a quickie here too. Actually I’ve only just been accepted into the Consortium so quite a lot of the goings-on are quite new to me.
The Herschel ATLAS (or H-ATLAS for short) is the largest open-time key project involving Herschel. It has been awarded 600 hours of observing time to survey 550 square degrees of sky in 5 wavelenth bands: 110, 170, 250, 350, & 500 microns. It is hoped to detect approximately 250,000 galaxies, most of them in the nearby Universe, but some will undoubtedly turn out to be very distant, with redshifts of 3 to 4; these are likely to be very interesting for studies of galaxy evolution.
Herschel is currently in its performance verification (PV) phase, following which there will be a period of science validation (SV). During the latter the ATLAS team will have access to some observational data to have a quick look to see that it’s behaving as anticipated. It is planned to publish a special issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics next year that will contain key results from the SV phase, although in the case of ATLAS many of these will probably be quite preliminary because only a small part of the survey area will be sampled during the SV time.
Herschel seems to be doing fine, with the possible exception of the HIFI instrument which is currently switched off owing to a fault in its power supply. There is a backup, but the ESA boffins don’t want to switch it back on and risk further complications until they know why it failed in the first place. The problem with HIFI has led to some rejigging of the schedule for calibrating and testing the other two instruments (SPIRE and PACS) but both of these are otherwise doing well.
The data for H-ATLAS proper hasn’t started arriving yet so the meeting here in Cardiff was intended to sort out the preparations, plan who’s going to do what, and sort out some organisational issues. With well over a hundred members, this project has to think seriously about quite a lot of administrative and logistical matters.
One of the things that struck me as particular difficult is the issue of authorship of science papers. In observational astronomy and cosmology we’re now getting used to the situation that has prevailed in experimental particle physics for some time, namely that even short papers have author lists running into the hundreds. Theorists like me usually work in teams too, but our author lists are, generally speaking, much shorter. In fact I don’t have any publications yet with more than six or seven authors; mine are often just by me and a PhD student or postdoc.
In a big consortium, the big issue is not so much who to include, but how to give appropriate credit to the different levels of contribution. Those senior scientists who organized and managed the survey are clearly key to its success, but so also are those who work at the coalface and are probably much more junior. In between there are individuals who supply bits and pieces of specialist software or extra comparison data. Nobody can pretend that everyone in a list of 100 authors has made an identical contribution, but how can you measure the differences and how can you indicate them on a publication? Or shouldn’t you try?
Some suggest that author lists should always be alphabetical, which is fine if you’re “Aarseth” but not if you’re “Zel’dovich”. This policy would, however, benefit “al”, a prolific collaborator who never seems to make it as first author..
When astronomers write grant applications for STFC one of the pieces of information they have to include is a table summarising their publication statistics. The total number of papers written has to be given, as well as the number in which the applicant is the first author on the list, the implicit assumption being that first authors did more work than the others or that first authors were “leading” the work in some sense.
Since I have a permanent job and students and postdocs don’t, I always make junior collaborators first author by default and only vary that policy if there is a specific reason not to. In most cases they have done the lion’s share of the actual work anyway, but even if this is not the case it is important for them to have first author papers given the widespread presumption that this is a good thing to have on a CV.
With more than 100 authors, and a large number of collaborators vying for position, the chances are that junior people will just get buried somewhere down the author list unless there is an active policy to protect their interests.
Of course everyone making a significant contribution to a discovery has to be credited, and the metric that has been used for many years to measure scientific productivity is the numbered of authored publications, but it does seem to me that this system must have reached breaking point when author lists run to several pages!
It was all a lot easier in the good old days when there was no data…
PS. Atlas was a titan who was forced to hold the sky on his shoulders for all eternity. I hope this isn’t expected of members of the ATLAS consortium, none of who are titans anyway (as far as I can tell). The plural of Atlas is Atlantes, by the way.
As I promised a few days ago, the “first light” images from the Herschel instrumment SPIRE have now been released (along with news of the other instruments on Herschel) and I have to say they’re pretty spectacular! I’m told that these pictures are much better than anyone expected at this stage because Herschel as a whole still hasn’t finished its calibration and other preparations it needs to do before commencing as an observatory proper.
Here, for example, is an image of the spiral galaxy M74 (also known as NGC 628) as shown by SPIRE and by the American Spitzer satellite, which was launched a few years ago. This image is taken at 250 microns, which is further into the infrared than the Spitzer image (160 microns), but has higher resolution owing to Herschel’s bigger mirror (3.5m). The SPIRE instrument is also much more sensitive than Spitzer so by a combination of these effects the detail this image reveals is really stunning.
What you’re actually seeing in this image is long-wavelength radiation emitted by dust which has been heated up by stars in the galaxy. The dust obscures the optical light from the stars but they leave clues to their existence in the infrared light the dust gives off. You can see dark lanes in the optical image here where the dust is absorbing the starlight.
Here is M74 again, but shown with two additional infrared “colours” (at 350 and 500 microns). By making observations like this at different wavelengths SPIRE can reveal information about the spectrum and hence temperature of the dust emission.
Congratulations to the Cardiff SPIRE team for a stunning success. If these images are any guide to the quality of data Herschel is going to be producing over the next few years then we’re all in for a treat!
After a fun but frantic few days in the big city I’ve now escaped back to the relative cool of Cardiff. The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition appears to be going very well, but my part in it has come to an end. The rest of the team will have the joy of continuing for the rest of the week and then dismantling the exhibit and returning with it at the weekend.
The exhibition proper started on Tuesday and our stand was drawing a lot of visitors right from the word go. That’s partly because we had a very good spot, right near the entrance, but we also had a bit of coverage on the BBC News which might have helped. Inside the building we attracted quite a lot of people to our stand because we were showing infrared images on a large flatscreen monitor of people as they walked past. That seemed to draw people in large numbers to the other parts of the exhibit which was, after all, the purpose of it.
People look quite strange in the infra-red. Here’s an example:
That’s me. The calibration scale to the right is in Celsius: hot is white (37) or yellow and cold is blue or black (26). Red is in the middle, around 30 Celsius. Different people seem to have different hot spots and cold spots: most appear to have cooler ears and lips compared to the rest of their faces, but noses vary considerably in temperature.
There was only one potentially embarrassing moment, when a group of teenage lads wandered in front of the camera. Apparently, a certain type of mens’ underwear has very high emissivity around 10 microns. I just happened to glance up at the monitor and noticed a prominent hotspot just in time to tilt the camera up before anyone else noticed. Thereafter we kept it focussed above waist level just in case…
After my shift on Tuesday I had to nip back on the tube to my temporary lodgings, shower, change into my dinner jacket and black tie, and then return to the Royal Society for the much-anticipated Soirée. Taking the tube turned out to be a mistake. The heatwave currently gripping London has turned the underground system into something resembling the inside of an oven, so I decided to walk back rather than melt again when I’d got changed. I drew a few strange looks walking through Soho in my glad rags, but at least it was cooler at street level than on the Underground.
The evening occasion turned out to be very busy too. To my surprise, it wasn’t just champagne and posh nibbles: a substantial meal was on offer in a marquee at the back of the Royal Society building. However, there were large crowds moving through the exhibition and we only had six people on the exhibit. We therefore staggered our trips to the grub tent making sure there was always someone at the exhibit to deal with the invited guests. By the time my turn came round it was 9.30 and the whole thing closed at 10.00. I still had time for a good nosh-up and a couple of glasses of wine, though, so all was well.
At the exhibit there was a steady supply of champagne and VIP guests. Lots of Lords and Ladies and other bigwigs, but I hadn’t the faintest idea who most of them were. These are all the kind of people who assume that everyone on the planet (a) knows who they are and (b) is impressed to have the opportunity to meet them. Being surrounded by such a sea of effortless superiority is quite intimidating but, fortunately, there were also some familiar faces who stopped by and appeared interested. The noted biologist Steve Jones dropped by, and had his picture taken in the infrared, as did John Polkinghorne. I had met Polkinghorne before not long ago, but he clearly didn’t remember me at all.
“Medals may be worn” was one of the instructions, but I had neglected to bring my cycling proficiency badge.
In the Dark 