Paris, 21 mar ( EFE).-“cold, distant and unexplored universe” places are now visible to humans for the first time thanks to the mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) Herschel, today underlined its director of science and robotic exploration, Alvaro Gimenez Cañete.

European Observatory Herschel, the largest telescope ever sent into space, is a more “powerful and advanced” continuation of the ISO satellite, was launched from French Guiana in 2009 and is able to make its measurements “far infrared”, explained the Spanish expert in an interview with Efe.

Is a program, he added, which is allowing better understanding the birth and the formation of stars and galaxies, processes that occur at low temperatures and which correspond to the first phase of its existence, until they suffer nuclear fusions.

“Would be pretentious to believe that we can understand the universe by the light of the range of optical, sensitive to high temperatures,” stressed Giménez.

The Herschel telescope, he emphasized, is a revolution, because you can work less than 200 degrees celsius and can see that which escapes the vision at other temperatures.

Between the progress made thanks to this mission, the scientist cited discoveries the existence of unknown molecular clouds and that galaxies evolved over cosmic time much faster than it was believed.

Also highlighted findings “unexpected”, but of the utmost importance, as the water contained in the comet Hartley 2 has the same composition as the oceans, although still “we don’t know how formed”.

Stressed that one of the main challenges of the Herschel mission was, precisely, build detectors and functioning systems at very low temperature to detect very low energy light.

The construction of the telescope, he added, was not easy, with 3.5 meters in diameter it is the largest that exists in the world, as well as having “a special quality and an innovative technology”.

Herschel, the month of may will be three years, will be exhausted helium used to cool its instruments in mid-2013, he recalled.

Despite this limited life expectancy, Gimenez stressed that this project of ESA “has opened up a huge field and has placed Europe at the forefront in the field of Infrared Astronomy”.

, Japan is already interested in its continuation with a new mission to be called SPICA and in which the European Agency raises to cooperate. EFE