Stars are born and die in clouds of gas and dust, opaque to most
types of radiation, but transparent in the infrared. Requiring
complex detectors, space missions and cooled telescopes, infrared
astronomy is the last branch of this discipline to come of age.
After a very successful sky survey performed in the eighties by the
IRAS satellite, the Infrared Space Observatory, in the nineties,
brought spectacular advances in the understanding of the processes
giving rise to powerful infrared emission by a great variety of
celestial sources.
Outstanding results have been obtained on the bright comet
Hale-Bopp, and in particular of its water spectrum, as well as on
the formation, chemistry and dynamics of planetary objects in the
solar system. Ideas on the early stages of stellar formation and on
the stellar initial mass function have been clarified.
ISO is the first facility in space able to provide a systematic
diagnosis of the physical phenomena and the chemistry in the close
environment of pre-main sequence stars, in the interstellar medium,
and in the final stages of stellar life, using, among other
indicators, molecular hydrogen, ubiquitous crystalline silicates,
water and ices.
ISO has dramatically increased our ability to investigate the
power production, excitation and fuelling mechanism of galaxies of
every type, and has discovered a new very cold dust component in
galaxies.
ISO has demonstrated that luminous infrared galaxies were
brighter and much more numerous in the past, and that they played a
dominant role in shaping present day galaxies and in producing the
cosmic infrared background.
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