A false-colour image of the ’Tarantula Nebula’ taken in visible and ultraviolet light by the SuperBIT telescope shortly after launch (image courtesy of SuperBIT)
A false-colour image of the 'Tarantula Nebula' taken in visible and ultraviolet light by the SuperBIT telescope shortly after launch (image courtesy of SuperBIT) - Astronomers have successfully launched a balloon-borne telescope that has begun capturing images of the universe on its first flight above the Earth's atmosphere. The Super Pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) was flown to the edge of space by a helium-filled NASA scientific balloon the size of a football stadium. There, it will help researchers investigate the mystery of dark matter. SuperBIT has already taken its first images on this flight, showing the "Tarantula Nebula" - a bright cluster of gas and dust in a galaxy neighbourhood near our Milky Way - and the collision between the two galaxies NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, known as "the Antennae." SuperBIT is a collaboration between the University of Toronto, Princeton University, Durham University and NASA. "A dedicated team of students developing one of the world's great telescopes - it's inspiring," says Barth Netterfield , a professor in University of Toronto's David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics and the department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and an associate at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. "After a decade of tremendous effort, we are getting these exquisite images with a wide range of science goals, which will help us to better understand the universe." A false-colour image taken by the SuperBIT telescope shows of a pair of galaxies smashing into each other SuperBIT is the first balloon-borne telescope capable of taking wide-field images - its sharpness of vision is not affected by the atmosphere, but only by the laws of optics.
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