Cold Dust At The Heart Of TheUniverse
The Universe contains vast quantities of very cold dust and gas; from the relatively dense regions where young stars are born to the most distant galaxies, still in the process of forming after the Big Bang. The new SCUBA instrument, conceived, designed and built at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and installed on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, will make important breakthroughs in the study of these challenging and exciting phenomena. The spaces between the stars are very cold, where the interstellar dust and gas is typically at -260 degrees Celsius. Yet it is in these very dense dust clouds that stars are born. Just as a heated poker cools and glows redder until eventually a