A WHOLE range of objects never seen before could soon reveal themselves to a telescope with night vision.
狈础厂础鈥檚 , which headed to the launch pad last week, will map the entire sky in infrared. It will spot everything from nearby cool, failed stars to intense, 10-billion-year-old starburst galaxies.
The telescope will also be able to distinguish objects like asteroids and comets from more distant stars. WISE is expected to find about 100,000 new asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and hundreds of asteroids that pass close to Earth. It will be especially good at seeing dark objects that are nearly impossible to find using existing ground-based telescopes, as the objects radiate heat that WISE will see.
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The telescope will also be able to spot Jupiter-sized objects up to 60,000 astronomical units away (1 AU equals the Earth-sun distance). The distribution of comet paths has suggested that a very large planet could be lurking at 25,000 AU, says WISE project scientist of 狈础厂础鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. WISE will be looking for it.
