Category: Observatories

If you can’t afford to send a telescope to space, you’ll want the next best thing; a location on Earth which is cold, dry and at a high altitude. Perhaps the best place on Earth is “Dome A”, a high altitude region in Antarctica – the coldest and driest place on Earth. A team of astronomers recently climbed the summit of Dome A, and installed a new robotic observatory that should see some amazingly clear skies.

The team of scientists that made the journey represents 6 international institutions, including Texas A&M University and the Polar Research Institute of China. They arrived at Dome A on January 11th, in the middle of the southern Summer, and completed the facility installation on Saturday.

The installation is called the PLATeau Observatory, or PLATO, and was built by the University of New South Wales in Australia. PLATO is equipped with a suite of instruments that will let it measure the quality of the conditions, to confirm that it really has the best seeing on Earth. But if the calculations are correct, a 2 metre telescope here would be the equivalent of an 8-metre telescope built somewhere else. And an 8-metre telescope would rival the 30-metre supertelescopes in the works at various locations around the world.

One of the most important instruments is a set of four telescopes built at Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing. These are 4 telescopes with 14.5-centimetre apertures. Each one is equipped with a different filter to view the night sky at a different color or wavelength.

The facility is powered by six diesel engines that use aviation fuel in the Winter, and then it switches over to solar energy in the Summer. It will be completely autonomous, operated remotely over the low-bandwidth Iridium satellite service. Workers will then pick up the bulk of its research at the annual servicing visits.

Even in the dead of Winter, where temperatures plunge to -82 degrees Celsius, the facility will be working away gathering images. That’s because the weather around Dome A is very calm and stable. You don’t get the ferocious storms here that you see in other parts of Antarctica. It’s just cold and calm.

With PLATO installed, the team turned around and left the region on a convey of snow tractors. They’ll travel non-stop for 18 days to the coast of Antarctica, and then back to civilization.

Original Source: Texas A&M University News Release

UK astronomers have been dealt a serious and unexpected blow. Funding cuts to space research has stopped the nation from continuing its work at the Gemini observatories in Hawaii and Chile. The UK helped to build the 8.1 meter telescopes and have ploughed £70 million ($140 million) to date into the construction and development of the sites since the late 1990’s. In an effort to plug a £80 million ($160 million) deficit in space research funding, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has signalled to researchers that the UK will be pulling out of the project, leaving astronomers bemused and angry.

Next month, the UK’s involvement in the multi-national Gemini project will end. After a decade of construction and research, the world’s most advanced telescopes will lose one of their most influential donors as the STFC has declared the British involvement in the project surplus to the government’s vision for the future of UK science. This decision will leave the US, Canada, Chile, Australia, Brazil and Argentina to continue astronomy without their 23.8% shareholder. The move has bewildered astronomers as the Gemini project is considered to be one of the most successful international collaborations in recent years, allowing the seven nation “science club” to observe both hemispheres’ night sky with unparalleled clarity.

“To withdraw from the state-of-the-art Gemini facilities leaves the UK ground-based astronomy strategy in disarray – some would say deliberately sabotaged.” – Professor Paul Crowther, Sheffield University, UK.

This move by the STFC highlights the recent turbulence in physics funding. After the merger of two of the largest research councils in the UK, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) and the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), the STFC was formed and inherited the unenviable task to find the money to cover the research funding deficit. New prestige facilities such as the Diamond Synchrotron, in Oxfordshire, are over-budget and the shortfall has to be found elsewhere. Requests have been made to the UK government for more funds, but the request has fallen on deaf ears. International research has therefore suffered, with more cuts in astronomy, particle physics and laser optics forecast. Jobs will be lost and the prediction is that the UK will have some of the most advanced physics research centers, but with no scientists to do the research.

The Gemini project is just one of the recent casualties during these dim times for UK physics. A campaign website outlining all the recent cutbacks by the STFC funding crisis has been set up to bring attention to the spiralling problem. The banner reads: “International Year Of Astronomy, 2009 (unless you’re from the UK*). The Universe – Yours To Discover. *All we could afford was this logo.” – STFC Funding Crisis: Astronomy.

Worrying times for the UK, and international physics as a whole.

Sources: BBC website

As telescopes go, Hubble isn’t actually that large; it’s only 2.4 metres. But it has a huge advantage over the much larger ground-based observatories: it’s up in space, high above the distortions of the Earth’s atmosphere. But astronomers have developed techniques to overcome the atmospheric blurring, creating some of the most detailed images ever seen from the Earth.

One technique to overcome atmospheric distortion is called adaptive optics. With this system, an artificial guide star is projected into the sky with a laser. A computer watches how the artificial star is distorted by the atmosphere, and then warps portions of the mirror many times a second to counteract these distortions. Unfortunately, this technique only works really well in the infrared spectrum.

But a new camera system has been developed to bring this power to the visible spectrum as well. The “Lucky Camera” works by recording partially corrected images taken using the adaptive optics system at very high speed, capturing more than 20 frames a second. Most of these images are still smeared by the atmosphere, but the occasional one is crisp and clear and unblurred. The software can recognize these clear ones, and keeps them to later assemble into a single, sharp image.

Using this software on the 5.1 metre Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, astronomers were able to achieve images with twice the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. Previously, it was 10 times worse.

It captured images of the globular star cluster M13, located 25,000 light-years away, and astronomers were able to separate stars that were only one light-day apart. It also showed incredibly fine detail on the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), revealing filaments which are only a few light-hours across.

Just imagine what will be possible when this technology comes to the even larger Keck II and Very Large Telescopes; not to mention the incredible possibilities with the upcoming 30-metre class telescopes still in the planning stages.

You can see a page describing all the different images, which shows comparisons between the pre- and post-LuckyCam technique. There’s also a good comparison between Hubble and Palomar with adaptive optics and LuckyCam.

Original Source: Caltech News Release

If you think you need to install a telescope on a mountaintop, or even above the surface of the Earth, think again. A new telescope currently being installed near the South Pole has detectors more than 2 kilometres under the surface of the Antarctic ice cap. For the neutrinos it’s searching for, that much ice is the same as nothing at all.

Neutrinos are illusive particles generated by the fusion reactions in the Sun and other cosmic events. They barely interact with normally matter, passing right through like it’s complete vacuum. Only in the rarest occasions will a neutrino collide directly normal matter, releasing a torrent of subparticles and radiation.

Once completed, the IceCube observatory will consist of detectors arranged in a 1 kilometre cubic array frozen underneath the surface of the Antarctic ice cap. Construction is currently into its 3rd year, with more than 20 institutions participating. The final instrument will consist of more than 70 strings, each containing more than 60 optical detectors frozen into the ice.

When operational, IceCube will be able to detect neutrinos from the Sun, as well as some of the most catastrophic events in the Universe, such as a supernova or black hole. The neutrinos will interact with particles of ice within the array, and produce a cascade of particles that will produce a flash of light captured by the optical detectors.

The full construction is going to take another 3-4 years, but the array is already operational, and gathering scientific results.

Original Source: University of Delaware News Release

A key scientific instrument attached to the Gemini South observatory was damaged in late April when a malfunctioning heater raised its temperature to 200-degrees Celsius. It was never meant to withstand temperatures this high, and will be out of commission for several months while technicians make repairs.

The device is called Gemini Near Infrared Spectrometer (GNIRS), and it measures the spectrum of light coming from a distant object, to help astronomers understand its composition.

On the weekend of April 20th, technicians were using a system that warms up the instrument between observations, and it was left running for several days. This is standard procedure; however, an independent controller that shuts off power to the heater failed, and allowed the heater to reach 200-degrees.

Once they realized the instrument was being cooked by the heater, the technicians shut it down and allowed it to cool for a few days. They removed the instrument from the telescope, and dismantled it to access the damage.

Unfortunately, portions of GNIRS were damaged, and the CCD science detector was completely destroyed. Most of the instrument is undamaged, but it will still take several months to examine each component, clean and replace the damaged ones, and retest it for astronomical duty.

Original Source: Gemini News Release