To decode this information, scientists must become detectives. Detectives search for suspects by matching the fingerprints found at a crime scene with the fingerprints of known criminals. Scientists piece together an object s profile by matching the colors collected from it with the elements that emit those colors. An object s colors, arranged in a series according to wavelengths, are called its spectrum. The instrument will collect visible to ultraviolet light, providing a broader range than the previous spectrographs and thus more information about an object.
Objects emit light in different wavelengths.
The broader an instrument's wavelength range, the more information it can gather from an object. Astronomers can point the telescope at a star and measure its spectrum 30 times more rapidly than previous Hubble spectrographs, which could look at only one place at a time. With STIS, astronomers can observe a galaxy or nebula and gather spectral data from 512 different locations simultaneously. This means that many regions in a planet's atmosphere or many stars within a galaxy can be recorded in one exposure. Previous spectrographs had to make several observations of a target to collect the same information.