This area of sky, seen towards the constellation of Boötes, covers about 40 times the area of the Full Moon and is directed well away from the plane of our Galaxy. This allows Herschel to look out at the distant Universe, and see galaxies billions of light years away. This is one of thirteen sky maps in the first data release from HerMES (Herschel Multi-tierd Extragalactic Survey), a project which measures these seemingly empty regions of the sky in great detail. Read more
We in the HerMES team are very pleased to announce our first major data release, DR1. This release includes Herschel SPIRE sky maps and object catalogues. The maps were made using 250, 350 and 500 µm filters. These sub-milimeter wavelengths had not been significantly exploited before the Herschel Mission. The maps cover ~74 deg² of the sky, i.e. a volume of 6.6e8 (Mpc)³ for z<1.5 (and many of the galaxies that we see are expected to be at z>1.5) q.v. the SDSS which maps a volume of 3.5e8 (Mpc)³ for z<0.17. We are releasing data in many very well studied extragalactic survey fields and so we expect this will facilitate a huge range of astrophysics and cosmology. Read more