Drexel University Physics Colloquium
Where Did Half the Starlight in the Universe Go?
We believe that approximately half of all the light from all the stars since the beginning of the universe has been absorbed and reprocessed by the gas and dust in stellar nurseries. This means that when we look into the sky with our eyes we are only seeing half of that is happening as the universe evolves over cosmic time. I will describe the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope - BLAST. This NASA high altitude balloon mission was designed to reveal the hidden part of our universe. I will discuss the BLAST experiment and present results from our measurements of resolved and unresolved galaxies. I will also discuss the implications for star formation in our own galaxy and how dust is changing the way we look at current and future searches for primordial gravity waves with the Cosmic Microwave Background.