ESO Organisation Release | IAU | 2015 Aug 10
An international team of astronomers studying more than 200 000 galaxies has measured the energy generated within a large portion of space more precisely than ever before. This represents the most comprehensive assessment of the energy output of the nearby Universe. They confirm that the energy produced in a section of the Universe today is only about half what it was two billion years ago and find that this fading is occurring across all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the far infrared. The Universe is slowly dying.
The study involves many of the world’s most powerful telescopes, including ESO's VISTA and VST survey telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Supporting observations were made by two orbiting space telescopes operated by NASA (GALEX and WISE) and another belonging to the European Space Agency (Herschel) [1].
The research is part of the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) project, the largest multi-wavelength survey ever put together.
“We used as many space and ground-based telescopes as we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200 000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible,” says Simon Driver (ICRAR, The University of Western Australia), who heads the large GAMA team.
The survey data, released to astronomers around the world today, includes measurements of the energy output of each galaxy at 21 wavelengths, from the ultraviolet to the far infrared. This dataset will help scientists to better understand how different types of galaxies form and evolve.
All the energy in the Universe was created in the Big Bang, with some portion locked up as mass. Stars shine by converting mass back into energy, as described by Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 [2]. The GAMA study sets out to map and model all of the energy generated within a large volume of space today and at different times in the past. ../
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Panchromatic Data Release
(far-UV|far-IR) and the low-z energy budget ~ Simon P. Driver et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1508.02076 > 09 Aug 2015