| Abstract: |
The WISE passbands at 3.4 and 4.6 microns are a powerful tool for detecting very low luminosity brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood, because their methane dominated atmospheres are bright at 4.6 microns and very faint at 3.4 microns. Both shot WISE filters are quite sensitive to the photospheric emission from stars, even the old red stars that dominate the luminosity of early-type galaxies. A typical high galactic latitude WISE source is an unresolved galaxy with a median redshift near 0.5. Regions of current star formation are quite bright at 12 and 22 microns as well, and WISE has obtained images of star forming regions in the Milky Way, traced the spiral arms of nearby resolved galaxies, and detected emission from highly luminous distant galaxies. Non-thermal power law emission from QSOs is well detected in the WISE passbands at 3.4 and 4.6 microns. |
