If this had happened at the treasury in 2007 then Herschel and Planck wouldn’t be facing budget cuts in the UK, and there would be rather more astronomy, nuclear and particle physics being done in the UK in the next 5 years…
Thanks to John Butterworth for this!
Over the next several weeks we’re going to be saying a bit more about the various Herschel first science results that were discussed at the meeting in Madrid just before Christmas. These are very early results that have not been fully digested or understood, but they give a taste of what is to come once these various projects collect many times more data on their targets and the scientists working on them have had more time to understand the results.
The first set of new results we’re going to discuss are observations of Trans-Neptunian Objects – dwarf planets at the edges of our own solar system like Pluto, Makemake and Eris. My field is extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, so my professional work doesn’t usually involve such things, but I do find them interesting on several levels. Firstly, they’re the most distant objects in our solar system and the least affected by the Sun, so they’re the closest thing we have to the very earliest objects to form around the Sun. Secondly, they’re so distant that they could be thought of as being on the edge of interstellar space – they are, in a sense, the boarder guards of the solar system. Finally, and this isn’t really a scientific point, I’m working on some science fiction set in trans-Neptunian space and beyond so any new results have a bearing on what I’m going to write.
What has Herschel seen of TNOs? So far a handful have been observed with the SPIRE and PACS instruments. The aim is to better understand their basic properties – size, mass, albedo – by measuring the amount of far-IR light that they emit. Since they’re small, maybe 1000km in diameter, distant and cold, they are very faint and require a large telescope like Herschel for them to be detectable. The second picture shows what PACS saw when it observed Pluto. This is a ‘differencing’ observation, where the target is observed in one position on the detector, then moved to another and the two are subtracted. This process is repeated several times so you see a positive image at the centre and other positive and negative images at the reference positions.
PACS observed six TNOs, including Pluto. Two were fainter than predicted based on what we thought we knew about them, one was significantly brighter and three were about right. Meanwhile two TNOs were observed by SPIRE and here too things weren’t quite what was expected.
What does all this mean? We don’t know just yet, but since the results aren’t quite what was predicted we’re clearly learning something new about these objects. They might be more reflective – have higher albedo – than we thought, their surfaces might be more rocky, or their sizes might not be what is expected.
As with all the data we’ve seen from Herschel so far, there’s a lot more work to be done before we understand what the telescope is telling us. But it’s clear that Herschel is going to bring new light to our own solar system along with the rest of the observable universe!
Reports from various places, including its builders SRON and the BBC reveal that the HIFI instrument on Herschel is now back to full working order.
This is great news for Herschel as it means its third instrument, which gives it high resolution spectroscopic capabilities needed to fully understand the chemistry and physics of star formation, is back!
There’s a whole lot of information about recent science results we hope to post over the next few weeks as well.
The presentations from the Madrid Herschel workshop are now publicly available:
http://herschel.esac.esa.int/SDP_IR_wkshop.shtml
Lots and lots of good stuff there!
The irony of the first Herschel science results coming out on the same day that STFC wields the hatchet. There are limbs lopped off all over the place, either immediately or in the near future. UKIRT, the world’s first infrared optimized telescope and a workhorse of UK astronomy for decades, is to go. We’re to leave Gemini and the ING telescopes on La Palma by 2012. We’re withdrawing from XMM-Newton, Cassini, SOHO, Cluster and much more. The headline list is available here and the full rankings can be found here. For those of you interested in Herschel and Planck, you’ll be pleased to know that these projects are safe, but followup observations of Herschel sources will be more difficult with fewer observatories on the ground available to us.
But the underlying message, and the real damage, comes in the cuts to postdoc and fellowship grants. Facilities like UKIRT and Herschel don’t do science, people do, and the UK will have fewer physicists as a result of these cuts. The 25% cut to fellowships gives an indication of what STFC and, by implication, their political masters, thinks should be the size of the UK astrophysics and particle physics community.
We’re always told that we are rewarded for success, in terms of funding. UK astrophysics is second only in the world to US in terms of scientific output and impact. We do this on much less money than the US. And what is our reward for this success? Cuts.
Thank you HMG. Your efforts to make the UK the best place in the world to do science are in tatters.
Lots of new Herschel science will be released over the next few days by ESA. The first new result is an image of a region in Acquilla (not the Eagle Nebula as I originally stated – apologies!) taken with the PACS and SPIRE instruments.
The Eagle Nebula image reveals the dust and young stars obscured from observation by telescopes, such as HST, working at shorter wavelengths. Much structure is seen in this image, revealing the complex turbulent interactions behind star and planet formation.
More images and science results are coming. There should be several more releases over the next few days, coinciding with the early Herschel science meeting currently underway in Madrid (I’m not there so can’t report live). ESA have set up a central resource for all new Herschel images – the OSHI – online showcase of Herschel images. There’s not much there at the moment, but it’ll soon be filling up!
2pm GMT is when STFC will announce its prioritised programme in astrophysics, particle and nuclear physics. What this effectively means, since they need to find ~£70M in cuts, is that this will be a cut list. By then end of today there will be far fewer projects in these fields, and probably far fewer people with jobs in them.
STFC is calling this exercise ‘Investing in the Future’ because they have to keep their political masters happy and because the people in charge haven’t got the backbone to admit the whole thing is cocked up. Keith Mason, the Chief Executive and an ex-X-ray astronomer (I can’t see any university department wanting to have him back), especially has been wholly craven in his stance on these cuts, going so far as to say this tis is good for the affected fields. I know the first job at STFC that I’d cut.
There is more discussion of today’s devastation in blogs and newspapers.
It is especially ironic that this is all happening on the same day that Herschel will announce its first full scientific results. Herschel has been an astounding success for UK science, both because the UK is the world leader in far-IR/submm astronomy, but also because we’ve led the construction of the SPIRE instrument which is performing superbly. But it is far from certain that the UK Herschel programme is going to survive today.
Those of you with twitter accounts might like to express your opinions on this issue, using the hashtag #stfc and with tweets directed at the science minister @lorddrayson
The funding axe is about to arrive in the UK. STFC council will meet tomorrow to approve the plans, with the details coming out on Wednesday afternoon.
Further discussion available here, here, and here.
There’ll also be a major Herschel press briefing on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll try to cover that here, but I hope you’ll understand if we’re a bit distracted by news about the cuts.
WISE – the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a mission to perform an all sky survey from 3.5 to 23 microns – has successfully launched and separated from the launch vehicle. Having gone through this stressful experience for the Herschel and Planck launch in May I know how good the WISE team must be feeling at this point!
For more information about WISE and the science it will produce, see the team webpages and for a movie of the launch and other details see the NASA WISE pages.
Congratulations to the WISE team! The real work starts now!
Next week will see the first science releases from Herschel at a big ESA press and science event in Madrid. There will be lots of exciting new science results and some stunning new images to look at. We’ll do our best to cover things here, but also look at all the other usual sources of information like ESA, the BBC and Cardiff’s SPIRE webpages.
Meanwhile, on a more local, UK scale, we’re having a week of ups and downs. Wednesday’s ‘pre-budget report’ announced £600 Million of cuts to ‘higher education, science and research budgets’ which is going to be really painful for the UK academic community. Late yesterday some possibly better news came in with the announcement of the formation of a UK space agency. It’s unclear what form this agency will take, how it will be funded or what it will spend its money on, but it is clear that Space in general is getting a higher profile in government than it has previously had, and its contribution to the UK economy is at last being recognised.
Elsewhere, there are some great new images from UK’s new VISTA telescope, and the launch of the WISE infrared survey satellite is eagerly awaited.
