Another example is Fomalhaut, a star surrounded by a disk of debris similar to our asteroid belt. Forty years ago, the disk was one of IRAS’ major discoveries because it also strongly suggested the presence of at least one planet, at a time when no planets had yet been found outside the solar system. Subsequent observations by Spitzer showed the disk had two sections – a cold, outer region and a warm, inner region – and revealed more evidence of the presence of planets.
Many other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, have since studied Fomalhaut, and earlier this year, images from Webb gave scientists their clearest view of the disk structure yet. It revealed two previously unseen rings of rock and gas in the inner disk. Combining the work of generations of telescopes is bringing the story of Fomalhaut into sharp relief.
Visionary Infrared Astronomy Survey
When IRAS launched in 1983, scientists weren’t sure what the mission would reveal. They couldn’t predict that infrared would eventually be used in almost every area of astronomy, including studies of the , the , the , the , the , and even the nature of one of the biggest cosmological mysteries in history, .
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IRAS set the stage for the European-led (ISO) and the ; the ; NASA’s (WISE), and the agency’s airborne (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy), as well as many .
“Infrared light is essential for understanding where we came from and how we got here, on both the biggest and smallest astrophysical scales,” said Michael Werner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Werner, who specializes in infrared observations, served as project scientist for Spitzer. “We use infrared to look back in space and time, to help us understand how the modern universe came to be. And infrared enables us to study the formation and evolution of stars and planets, which tells us about the history of our own solar system.”
On to Spitzer
If IRAS was a pathfinding mission, Spitzer was designed to . Many of Webb’s planetary targets in its first year had already been , which pursued a broad range of science goals, thanks to its wide field of view and relatively high resolution. During its 16-year mission, Spitzer uncovered new wonders from the edge of the universe (including some of the at the time) to our own solar system (such as a ). Researchers were also surprised to find that the telescope was a perfect tool for (planets beyond our solar system), something they hadn’t expected when building it.
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“With any telescope, you’re not just taking data for the sake of it; you’re asking a particular question or a series of questions,” said Sean Carey, a former manager for the Spitzer Science Center at IPAC, a data and science processing center at Caltech. “The questions we’re able to ask with Webb are much more complex and varied because of the knowledge we acquired with telescopes like Spitzer and IRAS.”
For example, Carey said, “We studied exoplanets with Spitzer and Hubble, and we figured out what you can do with an infrared telescope in that field, what types of planets are most interesting, and what you can learn about them. So when Webb launched, we jumped into exoplanet studies right from the get-go.”
Webb, too, is paving the way for future infrared missions. NASA’s upcoming (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) mission as well as the agency’s next flagship observatory, the , will continue to explore the universe in infrared.
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More About the Missions
IRAS was a joint project of NASA, the Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programmes, and the United Kingdom’s Science and Engineering Research Council. The mission was managed for NASA by JPL. Caltech in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about IRAS, visit:
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JPL managed the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington until the mission was retired in January 2020. Science operations were conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Spacecraft operations were based at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive operated by IPAC at Caltech.
For more information about Spitzer, visit:
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The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
For more information about Webb, visit:
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