By Eileen Lambert
Colorado Daily Staff Writer
Thursday, February 12, 1998

The mysterious past of the universe will soon be opened up and examined through a new CU-built ultraviolet-light-capturing instrument.

Quasars, which were once the brightest bodies in the universe, have continued to die out over time. They are the most powerful event at the middle of the galaxy and are so far away that their light is billions of years old before it reaches Earth, allowing scientists a look at the universe's distant past.

Eventually, quasars use up all the fuel around them and starve. Although only a scattering of quasars still exists, CU scientists will soon be able to use the $9-million Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer as a a "time machine" to look billions of light years into the past at multitudes of quasars and document the events that followed the Big Bang.

The instrument is part of a $100-million mission scheduled for launch in October. On Wednesday, the instrument was loaded and sent to Baltimore, Md., for integration into a NASA ultraviolet-light gathering satellite.

FUSE contains four telescopes that will collect and funnel UV light into the spectrograph. The information gathered will tell scientists the temperature, density and chemical composition of the quasars. The research will also bring an understanding of the matter in space between the Earth and the quasars, because scientists can observe how the matter absorbs the ultraviolet light coming from the quasars.

"We may see things we've never seen before, because we've never touched far ultraviolet wavelengths," said Michael Shull, a CU professor of astrophysics.

The Hubble Space Telescope looks at ultraviolet light, but the wavelengths it studies are limited. FUSE will help scientists discover all of the information available in shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light.

The instrument will have many uses for scientists. Professor Jon Morse, of CU's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, said his research will focus on the Orion Nebula and other stars that eject high blasts of gas, producing shock waves through the universe. This research will only examine objects 100 to a few-thousand light years away.

"There have been very few missions that have looked at ultraviolet wavelengths, and FUSE, by far, is the largest telescope looking at these ultraviolet wavelengths," Morse said. "This is going to open up an entire wavelength domain for discovery."

Unlike other telescopes, FUSE must be in orbit before it will work because the research is based on ultraviolet light. Ozone and oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere destroy ultraviolet light, protecting life but hindering Earth­based research.

CU will soon begin construction of another instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which is a $25-million project. The spectrograph is set for completion and installation on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002. This instrument will look at longer ultraviolet light wavelengths than FUSE, but it reaches farther in the universe than existing technology.

"FUSE and COS are really going to tell us enormous things about how the galaxy was formed," Shull said.

The construction of FUSE employed about 32 CU students, about a quarter of whom were undergraduates, said John Andrews, the FUSE mission manager and CASA research associate. The idea was formulated about 17 years ago, and the project became reality five years ago. The international FUSE mission involves scientists from the United States, France and Canada. Warren Moos, chair of the John Hopkins Department of Physics and Astronomy, is directing the FUSE mission.