Paula Cleggett-Haleim

Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

June 27, 1991
(Phone: 202/453-1549)

Mary A. Hardin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(Phone: 818/354-5011)

RELEASE: 91-98

IRAS REVEALS MOST LUMINOUS OBJECT EVER SEEN IN SPACE

Astronomers studying very faint objects originally

detected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) have
discovered a new, very distant object which they say is the
most luminous object ever seen in the universe.

The observations, published today in the British science

journal Nature, show that this luminous object is a massive
dust cloud which radiates 99 percent of its light in the
infrared part of the spectrum.

The team of astronomers believe that this mysterious

cloud may be a massive galaxy in the process of formation --
or, alternatively, a quasar embedded in the dust of a massive
galaxy.

Infrared light -- or, more simply, heat radiation -- is

invisible to the human eye but can be detected by electronic
sensors such as those on the IRAS satellite. IRAS discovered
hundreds of thousands of infrared objects that astronomers are
now observing more closely in order to determine what they
are. Often these sources turn out to be dusty objects,
because dust particles are very efficient emitters of
infrared radiation.
 Astronomers define the luminosity of an object as the
total amount of energy emitted at all wavelengths. The
luminosity of this newly found object is an incredible 300
trillion times that of the sun, or 30,000 times that of the
entire Milky Way galaxy, which itself consists of hundreds of
billions of stars like the sun. This tremendous energy output
is greater even than the most luminous known quasars, which
were discovered in visible or ultraviolet light. Quasars are
thought to derive their immense power from the presence of
massive black holes in their centers.

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Unlike typical quasars, this new source is emitting most

of its light in the infrared region of the electromagnetic
spectrum. The dust cloud, which the team believes is
responsible for the far-infrared radiation, has a mass of
between 400 million and 1 billion times that of the sun. The
lower figure exceeds the mass of interstellar dust in any
previously known galaxy. The higher figure is comparable to
the whole mass of heavy elements in the Milky Way Galaxy, most
of which today is locked up in stars.

The object, in the constellation of Ursa Major, is

approximately 16 billion light-years from Earth. When
astronomers study distant objects they are essentially looking
back in time. In this case the object is seen as it was 16
billion years ago, or more than 80 percent of the way back in
time to when the universe is thought to have originated in the
Big Bang.

The team of astronomers, from four British universities

and two U.S. institutions, is led by Professor Michael
Rowan-Robinson of Queen Mary and Westfield College, London.
The team first observed the mystery object as part of a
program to identify infrared sources detected by IRAS.

The luminous dust cloud was discovered when the team was
trying to locate a visible light counterpart for one of the
new faint IRAS sources (the luminous source appears faint due
to its tremendous distance from Earth) at the United Kingdom's
4.2-meter (13.7-foot) William Herschel telescope in the Canary
Islands. Using a spectrometer, they were able to detect the
signatures of elements such as carbon and hydrogen in the
faint mystery source.

The redshift -- or shift of the characteristic element

lines towards the red end of the spectrum caused by the
expansion of the universe -- is 2.236, showing the object to
be a very distant galaxy. (The universal expansion causes
more distant parts of the universe to appear to be receding
from Earth more rapidly; thus, the more distant the object,
the larger the measured redshift of the spectral lines.)

More detailed images and spectra were obtained later at

Caltech's 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory near San
Diego and the William Herschel Telescope.

The powerhouse that heats the massive dust cloud and

causes it to glow so brightly in infrared light is hidden from
view, but the astronomers theorize that it may be due to about
a billion extremely hot, luminous young stars formed in the
early stages of the birth of a galaxy. If their theory is
correct, this discovery marks the first time astronomers have
witnessed the birth of a galaxy.

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An alternate theory is that the powerhouse is itself a

quasar, more luminous than ever seen before, shrouded from our
view by the cloud of dust. Astronomers from other
observatories around the world have begun to train their
telescopes on the new object to shed further light on how
galaxies and quasars formed during the early history of the
universe.
A joint mission between the United States, Netherlands and
United Kingdom, IRAS was launched by NASA in 1983. For 10
months it surveyed the entire sky, providing our first ever
comprehensive view of the universe at four different infrared
wavelengths.
 In 1985 the U.S. Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
(IPAC), funded by NASA and based at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology,
produced a catalog of sources detected by IRAS. From
1985-1988 IPAC re-analyzed the satellite data to produce a
more sensitive catalog of infrared sources.

Joining Rowan-Robinson on the team of astronomers

involved in the discovery are Dr. Tom Broadhurst, Dr. Andy
Lawrence, Seb Oliver and Andy Taylor of Queen Mary and
Westfield College, London; Dr. Richard McMahon of the
Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, England; Dr. Carol
Lonsdale, Dr. Perry Hacking and Tim Conrow of the JPL/Caltech
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC); Prof. George
Efstathiou and Dr. Will Saunders of the University of Oxford,
England; Prof. Richard Ellis of University of Durham; and Dr.
Jim Condon of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory,
Charlottesville, Virginia.

JPL's contributions to the project, as well as the U.S.

portion of the IRAS mission, are funded by NASA's Office of
Space Science and Applications.

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