Why Observe in the Far IR and Submillimeter?
Remember the first time you saw “The Wizard of Oz,” and the drab black-and-white of Kansas changed to the dazzling full color of Munchkinland? Imagine if landing in Oz also enabled you to see colors that no human eye had ever been able to detect – and these new colors revealed fantastic objects that had previously been invisible! That is what it was like when astronomers began observing in the infrared. In fact, some of the most interesting things in the Universe are visible only in light beyond the rainbow of colors that people can see. Radio waves, microwaves, x-rays, gamma rays, and the spectrum of visible colors are all really the same thing – electromagnetic energy. The differences are their wavelengths. Radio waves are long, measuring as much as hundreds of meters between peaks. Gamma ray wavelengths are extremely short, as little as trillionths of a meter. A photon of shorter-wavelength light packs more energy than a photon of longer-wavelength light. Within the limited range ou
