News 2002

Apr 04, 2002
The INTEGRAL payload calibration campaign was successfully completed in ESTEC.

From 2002, January 23rd to February 6th, an international team has fulfilled a very important calibration campaign on the whole INTEGRAL payload, in one of the clean room of ESA/ESTEC (The Netherlands). The satellite was in its in-flight configuration, with the FM model of the two gamma-ray telescope IBIS and SPI, and the two X-ray monitors JEM-X [see Figure 1].

Jun 01, 2002

What is the origin of the cosmic diffuse infrared background ?
A study, based on observations by the ISO infrared satellite, brings today a essential answer to this very important astrophysical question. With the help of deep sky images, obtained at the wavelength of 15 microns (medium infrared), a team of astronomers of the Service d'Astrophysique du CEA, in the context of an international collaboration, have discovered a large number of starburst galaxies which have been overlooked in previous observations at other wavelengths. These galaxies are indeed "shy" because their stellar birth regions are masked by a screen of interstellar dust and therefore only revealed in the infrared.

Feb 15, 2002

A team of astronomers from the Service d'Astrophysique du DAPNIA/CEA, in collaboration with scientists of the Padoue Observatory and of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered in a cluster of galaxies an activity of star formation with an intensity which was unsuspected in such an environment.

Using the infrared camera ISOCAM on board the ISO satellite, and the ground based optical Telescope of New Technology (NTT) at La Silla Observatory (Chile), the astronomers disclosed the formation of young stars in the cluster of galaxies Abell 1689 situated at about 2.5 billion light years. The presence of star nurseries hidden in distant clusters, if confirmed, traces a more general change of the properties of clusters with time. This is the first detection of such an evolution in the infrared.

 

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