Herschel tagged posts

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen. But scientists aren’t sure just how much there actually is in the Sun’s atmosphere, where it is hard to measure. Knowing the amount of helium in the solar atmosphere is important to understanding the origin and acceleration of the solar wind—the constant stream of charged particles from the Sun.

In 2009, NASA launched a sounding rocket investigation to measure helium in the extended solar atmosphere—the first time we’ve gathered a full global map...

A portion of the region of the sky investigated by the paper, as seen by Herschel. This region is about 1.5 times the size of the full moon in the sky. Credit: JIllian Scudder

A new Uni of Sussex study has cleared the air on what lies behind hot dust visible in the distant universe. Researchers found that the glow of heated dust reaching our planet is frequently due to 3 or 4 galaxies instead of a single one, as scientists had previously assumed. The study applied a statistical method to data from the Herschel Space Observatory to solve one of astrophysics’ great conundrums.

Dr Jillian Scudder said: “This is a really interesting result because when we assumed that one galaxy had to be responsible for all of the dust emission, it implied that the galaxy must be forming a tremendous number o...