Unlocking Cosmic Secrets

Results of physicist’s telescopic adventures BLAST off

UM physicist Joshua Gundersen

As a University of Miami graduate student, Nick Thomas helped to assemble a high-powered telescope the size of an SUV at the McMurdo scientific research station in Antarctica. His advisor, Joshua Gundersen, was in Miami, detained by the birth of his second son.

Gundersen, an associate professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was instrumental in designing BLAST (Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope) and kept abreast of its mission with phone calls and e-mails to the icy continent. For 11 days in 2006, BLAST soared 120,000 feet high, tethered by a balloon as it took measurements of the far reaches of space in three different submillimeter wavelengths. It recorded close to 1,000 dust-obscured “starburst” galaxies that are five to ten billion light years from Earth, produce stars at an incredible rate, and hide about half of the starlight in the cosmos.

“The light we’re getting from these submillimeter galaxies is from a time when they were first forming,” explains Gundersen. “In a sense, it’s like getting a baby picture.”

Astronomers and cosmologists hope this recently released data, along with data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray, will illuminate the galaxies’ evolutionary history, as well as answer questions about the development of other galaxies and the earliest stages of star formation in our own.

NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Canadian Space Agency, and other organizations funded BLAST’s development and construction, and its detector system was the prototype for the European Space Agency’s Herschel telescope, currently orbiting the Earth. Meanwhile, as Herschel peers into the dustiest and earliest stages of planet, star, and galaxy growth, a second BLAST is being built. Scientists hope to launch it next year from Antarctica. This time, Gundersen says he plans to be there.