Carnegie Institution of Washington

PANIC’s Great!

Recent near-infrared images from the new camera PANIC (Persson’s Auxiliary Nasmyth Infrared Camera)on the 6.5-meter Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, confirm that the camera and telescope hold a promising future for understanding the nature of dark energy, exploring the formation and evolution of distant galaxies, and identifying protoplanetary material around young stars.

PANIC is the first near-infrared camera built for the Magellan Project, a consortium with more than 300 astronomers from five institutions: the Carnegie Observatories, Harvard University, the University of Arizona, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan. Observatories astronomer, Eric Persson, is principal designer of the instrument. The camera was built at Carnegie over the last two years and began operations in Chile in April with stunning results.

Among the first objects PANIC imaged is the famous pair of interacting galaxies called the Antennae. This color image of the Antennae is a composite of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and PANIC data. The Antennae consist of many young, massive star clusters and a great deal of dust. Young stars are very blue and formed in this galactic collision, which also resulted in a lot of dust blocking more blue light (shorter wavelengths) than red light (longer wavelengths). For this reason, regions behind a lot of dust are much easier to see at longer, red wavelengths. In this picture the shorter-wavelength HST data were used for the blue and green color channels, while the PANIC data (longer, near-infrared data) were used for the red color channel. The blue star clusters, thus, really appear blue, while the very dusty regions, which are much easier to see in the near-infrared, really appear red. Note that toward the bottom of the image there is a large, red star cluster, barely visible in the HST data, that is quite obvious in the PANIC frame, indicating that it is buried under a great deal of dust.

This image pair of NGC 3132 shows the PANIC image of molecular hydrogen and an HST image that is sensitive to emission from oxygen. These pictures indicate PANIC’s ability to produce superb results.