2MASS Team Wins Award, Survey Provides Unprecedented View of Galaxies

May 22, 2006

Contact:

Martin Weinberg 413/545-3821

AMHERST, Mass. – The team members of the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) have been named recipients of the Maria and Eric Muhlmann Award for 2006. 2Mass is being recognized for its innovative advances that led to an unprecedented view of the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, and the dedication and guidance of its leaders. The award was announced today by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

2MASS, a project based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also has team members at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Comprising twin telescopes located in Arizona and Chile over a 3.5-year period, 2MASS produced the first high-resolution digital survey of the complete infrared sky, providing the international astronomical community with an unprecedented global view of the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. The survey gathered enough data to fill more than 2,000 hard drives on an average home computer—the most thorough census ever made of the Milky Way galaxy and the nearby universe.

“Because interstellar dust is easily penetrated by infrared light, the 2MASS survey is particularly useful for detecting objects previously obscured within the Milky Way, as well as the faint heat of very cool objects that give off very little of their own visible light,” says Martin Weinberg, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a project scientist for 2MASS.

According to Mary Kay Hemenway, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and secretary of the society’s board of directors, 2MASS is being recognized especially for the dedication and guidance of the project’s leaders in construction of the system and its level of sophistication. The Muhlmann Award is given “for recent significant observational results made possible by innovative advances in astronomical instrumentation, software, or observational infrastructure,” says Hemenway.

To cover the entire sky, 2MASS used two highly automated, 1.3-meter (51-inch) diameter telescopes, one at Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Ariz., the other at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The Arizona telescope began operations in June of 1997, while the Chilean telescope began scanning the
sky in March 1998. Both facilities completed their work on February 15, 2001.

The survey uncovered numerous stars with unique characteristics such that astronomers have had to update a century-old classification system of known types of stars, and also unveiled the coolest brown dwarfs, or failed stars, known to date. It also mapped new star-birth regions both in the Milky Way and in other galaxies, detected previously unknown galaxies seen behind the disk of the Milky Way, and discovered many new, dust-obscured active galaxies and quasars in the distant reaches of the universe that were missed by earlier surveys that used visible and ultraviolet light.

The successful completion of observations marked a milestone in modern astronomy, and the legacy continues. Astronomers are currently using 2MASS data extensively to support research on brown dwarfs, the Milky Way’s structure, the distribution of other galaxies in the nearby universe, and also for observations by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

According to Michael Skrutskie, the principal investigator of the project who is now at the University of Virginia, the 2MASS project resulted in databases and source catalogs that are “a treasure trove which will be mined for discovery by scientists and the public alike for decades to come.”

“We are exploiting these features to study the large-scale structure of the Milky Way as well as the properties of nearby galaxies by comparing 2MASS observations with those from other surveys. The high quality and uniformity of these data make 2MASS ideal for statistical analysis,” says UMass Amherst’s Weinberg.

Project Manager Rae Stiening of UMass Amherst noted at one point during 2MASS operations, “The idea of a survey is an old human activity, but the Two Micron All-Sky Survey has a modern twist. Just as English admiralty sent Captain Cook and others to map the world, this new survey has mapped the nearby universe.”

Stiening oversaw the development and construction of the 2MASS telescopes and cameras and managed the collection of survey data. At Caltech, IPAC developed the software system to convert raw digital data from the telescopes into images and catalogs useful to astronomers. IPAC also archived and distributed those data to the public via the Internet, in essence, turning home computers into desktop observatories.

2MASS was primarily funded by NASA’s Office of Space Science. Additional funding was provided by the National Science Foundation.

#255-06

E-mail story to a friend Printer-friendly version