The Spitzer Space Telescope was the highlight of the night for the Astronomy Society’s meeting April 13 with guest speaker Dr. Luisa Rebull speaking about Spitzer and the forming of stars and planets.
The meeting featured the formation of stars, planets and Lyman Spitzer’s role in identifying the process.
Rebull, staff scientist at California Institute of Technology was present to speak of the space telescope and spoke about her role with the Spitzer Science Center.
“I work for the Spitzer Science Center and what I do is I help support that spacecraft. I work for the community affairs team. We interact with the astronomical community; we help run proposal calls to decide who gets to use the telescope and what we get to observe with it.”
The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched into orbit on Aug. 25, 2003. It was named after Spitzer (1914 to 1997), who had proposed putting a telescope into space in 1946.
Spitzer differs greatly from other telescopes both on earth and other space telescopes like Hubble Space Telescope in a number of ways, explained by Rebull.
“Spitzer works in the infrared which is sort of redder than red light. That’s the main thing that makes it different than telescopes out there. It’s also a space-to-space telescope.
“Most of the telescopes we have are actually based on the ground, ground based telescopes. So a space-to-space telescope makes it unique and the fact it’s an infrared telescope makes it unique,” she continued.
“It’s also only 85 centimeters which is pretty small for a world class telescope, but it’s pretty powerful too. It has got some pretty powerful instruments which makes it a pretty unique instrument or device.”
Effectively, the Spitzer space telescope allows astronomers to observe dust in the universe in infrared light.
It observes “the old, the cold and the dirty; nearby dust in comets, to dust in planets, dust in large star forming regions and dust in the very edge of the universe,” said Rebull.
For student Joseph Miller, 31, found the meeting to be “well worth it.”
“The Astronomy Society lectures are always really interesting even though they are on Friday nights,” he said.
“Everything that we learned tonight was very informative. I didn’t know that there actually was a Spitzer telescope. I didn’t realize that the scope was revolving around the sun. I didn’t realize that it’s on an entirely different set of visuals than the Hubble telescope,” said Miller. Fellow student Denise Chiang, 26, had similar thoughts on the meeting.
“It was very interesting. It was the third one I’ve attended and it was very informative.
Right now in our astronomy class we’re learning about formations of the stars and it kind of coincided with our lecture. And it’s just interesting of just how our planets evolved around the stars,” said Chiang.
Towards, the end of the meeting, Professor Carolyn R. Mallory, adviser of the Astronomy Society commented, “Astronomy plays an important part in the sciences. It explains where we came from, what the universe is like, how everything began, even energy sources. Also, it just feels natural, like you’re part of the whole major spectrum.”
This meeting was the third of four meetings this semester. The fourth meeting will take place May 18.