Before we had the visually stimulating images from Hubble there were other images and concepts inspiring cosmologists. Not all of those images are visible to the naked eye.   The exploration of the universe is not limited to visible light and there is a full spectrum where visible light plays just a small part.  Which brings me to a lecture I attended this evening Professor Michael Rowan Robinson of the Imperial College London at the Royal Academy of Ireland.  The title of the lecture was “The Cosmology of Distant and Dusty Galaxies“. We were taken on a journey through the evolution of astronomy in the sub-millimetre wavelength, ( Infra-Red Astronomy) and shown just how much there is to see beyond the visible light we experience every day. Images of space can change dramatically when we look at them in different wavelengths.  I really liked the video he used to illustrate this point which I also found on YouTube. In this image we see the view of Dark Globule in IC 1396, or the “Elephant’s Trunk” change from the visible to the Infra-Red spectrum. Notice how final dramatic change.

IRAS - first IR Mapping of the visible universe

Next we were brought through Professor Michael Rowan Robinson’s involvement the IRAS telescope launched in 1983 which helped build one of our first 3D map of the universe including showing our galaxy in motion, then on to ISO and finally to Spitzer. A remarkable journey which I would not do credit by trying to replicate here. You can see his biography on wikipedia if you would like further information.

From this lecture I took away the following. There is a very real hunger in cosmology to look back into the depths of the universe and detect echoes of the Big Bang. There may be a limit to how far back we can see (and we are already detecting events which occurred within the first 4% of the life of the universe), and we may be close to that limit already.  But one thing is for certain. To pursue this goal we need to go beyond the human visible spectrum of light and see what else is out there. I’ll miss Hubble when its gone, but I may just start taking a closer look at Spitzer/Herschel and Planck, the latest in our exploration of the Infra-Red spectrum of light in the universe.

Spiral Galaxy image in Visible and InfraRed light

I’ll leave you with a final note. You may already know just how little of the spectrum of light we can see but maybe this image will help illustrate just how little that really is.

The full spectrum of light