Infrared Astronomy Book

These pages include links to material referred to in the book Infrared Astronomy: Seeing the Heat and to additional material that readers may find of use or interest. More links will be added as time allows, so keep watching!

Chapter 1

The Herschel Museum of Astronomy can be found here.

The NASA Cool Cosmos site has a wealth of information on infrared astronomy and some great images as well.

Websites for the JCMT and UKIRT, European Southern Observatory, Gemini, HST, ESA are among those that provide great images and regular updates on new scientific results.

Chapter 2

NASA’s Cool Cosmos site also describes a lot of infrared technology.

Chapter 3

NASA’s site detailing the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact with Jupiter can be found here.

The dynamic nature of Jupiter’s atmosphere can be seen in the NASA movie found here.

Chapter 4

You can look at some of the details of stellar evolution using Star in a Box.

Chapter 5

A movie showing the motion of jets emitted by a protostar, the Herbig Haro object HH47, can be found here.

Some of the images of star formation regions observed by the Herschel Space Observatory can be downloaded from here, or form the ESA Herschel webpages.

An astounding image from ALMA of the protoplanetary disk around the young star HL Tauri was released just after the book was published. Not only does this show the dust disk in astounding clarity, it also shows gaps in the disk which may be where the dusty material of the disk has been swept clear by planets in the process of formation.

Chapter 6

A European Southern Observatory video is about the motions of stars around the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, which were used to determine that its mass is 4 million solar masses, can be found here.

The G2 gas cloud, predicted to be disrupted by the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, did in fact survive its close approach. This means that it wasn’t the nebulous, low mass cloud that was originally thought, but must in fact be a more compact, massive, gravitationally bound system, like a young, still forming, star. Discussion of the latest results on this object can be found here in a new press release from ESO.

The Herschel view of the ‘Hubble tuning fork‘ of galaxy classifications, showing how dust emission changes as you go from elliptical to spiral galaxies, and from normal to barred spirals.

A movie showing what it might look like from the Earth during the collision between, and merger of, our own Milky Way galaxy and its nearest large neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy M31.

Chapter 7

NASA has webpages devoted to the Hubble Deep Field, and Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The first of these includes a video about the science as well.

A lovely animated movie demonstrating how Lyman-alpha absorption line systems work is here.

The ALMA webpages are here.

Chapter 8

NASA runs a data centre for CMB research called Lambda.

ESA’s main webpages for public information on Planck are here.

A video showing how Planck scans the sky can be found here.

Chapter 9

Links to the websites for future large telescope projects, including: the E-ELT, the TMT, the GMT, the LSST and the SKA.

An animation showing how the James Webb Space Telescope will assemble and deploy itself in space is here.

ESA’s pages on the Euclid mission can be found here.

 

Typos and Corrections

No book, they say, is ever finished, they are merely abandoned. But this book will not be abandoned! Typos and corrections to the printed edition of Infrared Astronomy: Seeing the Heat can be found here. And please email me if you find any more!

Page 89: the missing reference in the second paragraph, indicated by [?] is to the paper The initial mass function of simple and composite stellar populations by Pavel Kroupa, 2007, in Proceedings of the Meeting “Resolved Stellar Populations”.

The Index: something has gone wrong with the page numbers in the Index. To reach the page you want you need to add 2 to the page number given in the Index. This is presumably something that went wrong with the automatic generation of the Index entries that we all failed to spot. My sincerest apologies!