SWIRE: Mapping the Infrared Universe Deeply with Spitzer

The Spitzer Wide-area InfraRed Extragalactic survey is one of six very large programs undertaken as Legacy surveys during the first year of the Spitzer Space Telescope. SWIRE has imaged nearly 50 square degrees (equal to the area of 250 full moons) divided among 6 different directions on the sky, detecting over 2 million galaxies by their heat radiation, some of them over 11 billion light years away. More...

SWIRE Sound Bites

SWIRE can detect a "typical" galaxy (an L* galaxy in astronomer's lingo) to a redshift of 2 (over 10 billion light years away).

SWIRE is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of redshift ~1 covering the same volume at this distance (which corresponds to almost 8 billion light years), as Sloan does in the much more local Universe.

News

All SWIRE observations are now complete. The second release of processed images and star & galaxy catalogs is now available. More...

Featured Image: The Tadpole Galaxy