NASA's WISE space telescope sends back 'candy store' of galaxies, comets

Kevin Hall
Thursday, February 18, 2010 - 5:47am

NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope, launched back in December 14th of '09, has been tasked with piecing together the grand vista of space a little bit at a time.

"We've got a candy store of images coming down from space," said WISE principal investigator, Edward Wright of UCLA. As an adorably corny uncle might, he didn't close the doors on his metaphor: "Everyone has their favorite flavors, and we've got them all."

So far the WISE telescope has captured some absolutely amazing stuff, such as a view of the Andromeda galaxy, pictured above. More than just sending back some space porn, though, Ed Weiler, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, says WISE is fulfilling other goals as well: "WISE has worked superbly. These first images are proving the spacecraft's secondary mission of helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as critically important as its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared."

You can check it all out in the gallery below, with captions provided courtesy of NASA.

NASA, via The Register

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Comet Siding Spring appears to streak across the sky like a superhero in this new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The comet, also known as C/2007 Q3, was discovered in 2007 by observers in Australia.

This image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, highlights the dust that speckles the Andromeda galaxy's spiral arms. It shows light seen by the longest-wavelength infrared detectors on WISE (12-micron light has been color coded orange, and 22-micron light, red).

This infrared image taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a star-forming cloud teeming with gas, dust and massive newborn stars. The inset reveals the very center of the cloud, a cluster of stars called NGC 3603. It was taken in visible light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

This image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, highlights the Andromeda galaxy's older stellar population in blue. It was taken by the shortest-wavelength camera on WISE, which detects infrared light of 3.4 microns. A pronounced warp in the disk of the galaxy, the aftermath of a collision with another galaxy, can be clearly seen in the spiral arm to the upper left side of the galaxy.

This image of a dense cluster of galaxies was captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The cluster, called Fornax because of its location in a constellation of the same name, is 60 million light-years from Earth, and is one of the closest galaxy clusters to the Milky Way. Clusters are large families of galaxies that are gravitationally bound together, containing enough matter to pull even distant galaxies toward them.