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Posts Tagged ‘Telescopes’

Appropriately enough, the first images captured the Antennae Galaxies, a pair of colliding galaxies replete with stars and stellar nurseries. ALMA’s 39- and 23-foot dish antennae can resolve areas of dense, cold gas that other telescopes could not detect.

ALMA sits in the high Chilean desert, about 16,000 feet above sea level and above much of the interfering atmosphere. These pictures were made with 12 telescopes situated relatively close together; science observations during the next few months will be even clearer.

Closer-situated antennae yield a wide field of view, so astronomers can search for items they want to study in more detail. Moving the antennae farther apart provides a narrower focus, like using a finer lens on a regular telescope. Instead of tunable knobs, ALMA has 192 separate antennae pads for the huge dishes to be moved around.

Astronomers submitted more than 900 research proposals for the telescope’s first 9 months of observations, which the European Southern Observatory whittled down to about 100. A few key subjects:

A nearby star system called AU Microscopii, just 33 light-years away, with an infant star harboring a ring of planetisimals;
The dusty disk surrounding HD142527, a young star 400 light-years away, which has enough material to make a dozen Jupiters;
and the great Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

ALMA observes light at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths, allowing observations of the farthest and oldest phenomena in the observable universe. It’s powerful enough to study the cold, dark remnants of exploded stars, including the first stars, which died a few hundred million years after the Big Bang — that’s an era known as the cosmic dawn.

While this is all going on, more of the 100-ton antennae will keep being added until the observatory is complete sometime in 2013.

[ESO]

New supernovae are not terribly rare, but this one is unique because it is so close — 21 million light years away — and it’s of a type that is crucial to astronomical measurements. The supernova, PTF 11kly, is the youngest ever detected.

It showed up in the spiral galaxy M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, a rather large spiral (10 times the size of the Milky Way) located in the constellation Ursa Major, known to its friends as the Big Dipper. It’s a Type Ia supernova, a very bright type that is used for gauging distances among galaxies. The use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles helped astronomers prove how rapidly the universe is expanding, and led to the discovery of dark energy. So it’s an important type, and the discovery of a super-new, superclose supernova is tantalizing news for astronomers.

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which is designed to observe and discover astronomical events as they happen, spotted the supernova earlier this week, according to a news release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. First, a robotic observation system mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory scans the sky, and feeds data to a supercomputer at Berkeley Lab. The computers use machine learning algorithms to comb through the PTF data and flag interesting astronomical phenomena. Within a couple hours of spotting PTF 11kly, the system sent its coordinates to telescopes around the world so others could check it out, according to LBL.

Three hours later, telescopes in the Canary Islands captured the supernova’s spectral signature, and 12 hours later, astronomers using the Keck and Lick observatories determined it was a Type Ia. This makes the Canary Islands spectra the earliest Type Ia spectra ever taken. Afterward, astronomers sent an emergency request to NASA to use the Hubble Space Telescope, which will observe the supernova this weekend.

Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait describes that Type Ia supernovae occur when a super-dense white dwarf siphons material off a companion star. If the white dwarf siphons off enough material, it can start to fuse hydrogen into helium, and the whole star will explode. This ginormous energy release makes the supernovae very bright, which makes them useful for gauging intergalactic distances. Type Ia are all thought to explode in similar ways, allowing them to be used as standard benchmarks — standard candles in astronomical parlance. (Click through to Bad Astronomy for a full rundown of what this supernova may mean to astronomy.)

In a fortuitous find, astronomers may actually have a picture of the supernova progenitors. Hubble Space Telescope images taken back in 2002 show two red giant stars very close to the location of PTF 11kly, Plait points out. If a white dwarf was nearby, it could have siphoned material from one of those red giants, sparking the runaway fusion event that led to supernova. Follow-up observations will help prove this.

Catching this supernova so early will give astronomers a glimpse into its outermost layers, which will tell them about the exploded star’s characteristics, according to astronomer Andrew Howell of UC Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Global Telescope Network. “When you catch them this early, mixed in with the explosion you can actually see unburned bits from star that exploded! It is remarkable,” he said in a news release. “We are finding new clues to solving the mystery of the origin of these supernovae that has perplexed us for 70 years. Despite looking at thousands of supernovae, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

You can see it, too. The supernova is getting brighter every night, and it should be visible with a decent pair of binoculars within the next couple weeks, according to astronomers at LBL and Oxford University. The best time to see it will be just after evening twilight in the Northern hemisphere.

[Berkeley Lab, Bad Astronomy]

In astronomy, adaptive optics fixes the blurring of deep-space images by correcting for the turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere. These techniques have allowed the Keck telescopes in Hawaii to resolve deep-space objects with greater clarity than the Hubble Space Telescope. In microscopy, blurring is caused by the flowing cytoplasm of living cells, and adaptive optics can be used to correct for that, too.

Electrical engineers at the new W. M. Keck Center for Adaptive Optical Microscopy at UC Santa Cruz will develop new adaptive optics systems that can peer inside stem cells, for instance, to see how they differentiate.

Recent advances in optical microscopes have allowed scientists to see inside viruses and to watch cells in action in real time, both major improvements that increase resolution without harming living cells. But even the best microscope images are only clear up to the surface of the cells, according to William Sullivan, a UCSC cell biology professor. When peering inside the cell, things start to get blurry.

Adaptive optical microscopy would work by establishing a biological “guide star” as a reference point, and correcting for the distortions caused by cytoplasm flow.

In astronomy, telescopes use a star or a laser as a control beacon by which atmospheric blurring can be measured. The Keck Observatory shines a laser to create a fake “guide star” about 60 miles up — above most of the atmosphere — and uses it to measure starlight distortions. The light is bounced off a deformable mirror that smooths out the image. This process repeats every millisecond.

The UC Santa Cruz project is developing genetically engineered fluorescent proteins to serve as guide stars. The ideal protein would be small and it would look like a dot, providing a point source of light, a UC Santa Cruz news release explains. Sullivan is working with fly embryos and using a protein that tags a the center of a chromosome as the guide star. The rest of the chromosome is tagged with a different color.

Eventually, the researchers hope to develop a suite of guide star proteins that would help illuminate any kind of tissue.

“This has the potential to open up vast areas of cell biology that have been opaque to us,” Sullivan said.

To be clear, there are many more steps in the budget process before this is final — lawmakers are working on next year’s budget despite a stalemate between the White House and Republican leadership, so a lot could change in the next couple weeks. And odds are decent that at least some lawmakers will fight to preserve this enormous technological marvel (and the jobs associated with its construction). But this is not good news for astronomy, to put it mildly.

The House Appropriations Committee released its 2012 Commerce, Justice and Science funding bill today, ahead of a scheduled committee markup Thursday. The bill provides $50.2 billion overall for the nation’s projects in those three areas, which is $7.4 billion less than President Obama’s budget request. NASA’s budget is slashed by $1.6 billion, which is $1.9 billion less than Obama wanted. About $1 billion of that comes from the end of the shuttle program, and NASA Science funding is cut by $431 million from last year.

“The bill also terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management,” an Appropriations Committee press release says flatly.

While management problems are a little more subjective, the telescope is indeed massively over budget, as we’ve told you before. In November, a congressional panel described the telescope as “NASA’s Hurricane Katrina,” because of its destructive toll on other agency projects. That review found the telescope’s price tag had mushroomed to $6.5 billion and that it would not be ready until at least 2015. Then, just last week, the watchdog site NASA Watch obtained a memo from Goddard Space Flight Center describing that it may not launch until after 2018 — even that is “unfeasible,” the report said.

But that earlier report, last November, also pointed out a key fact: “The funds invested to date have not been wasted.” The JWST has enabled several engineering feats, from brand-new metal compounds to a huge space umbrella that will shield it from the sun. The umbrella will unfurl in space along with an enormous 18-piece primary mirror made of material that is supposed to warp in frigid temperatures. Astronomers say the JWST will provide unprecedented imagery of the deepest corners of the cosmos.

This bombshell is not the only piece of bad news for the scientific community. The National Science Foundation is also losing funding, set to receive $907 million less than Obama requested as part of his campaign to “Win the Future.” The NSF will get a modest $43 million for core research, Politico reports. Aside from that, NOAA is down $1 billion. The Environmental Protection Agency is down $1.5 billion, about 18 percent.

Pentagon spending would grow by $17 billion in 2012, on the other hand.

Again, this is all far from over, and plenty of fiscal feuding remains before we can write the JWST’s obituary. But with a budget debate raging in Washington — and, many economists say, the specter of a new economic crisis looming — future space telescopes could be a low priority.

[via The Hill]

Over the next five years, the VST will make three surveys of the southern sky, all of which will be made public. The surveys all have different core objectives--one will study dark matter and galaxy evolution away from the Milky Way, another will focus on dark energy, and the third will map the structure of our own galactic disc--but because they will all be conducted in the visible spectrum we can all expect to benefit from some seriously beautiful space pics.

How many? Roughly 30 terabytes of raw data will flow to European servers and out into the public domain each year, much of which will consist of images snapped around the galaxy and the larger universe--images just like the ones you see here. Above we see the star-forming region Messier 17, part of the Swan Nebula located at the Milky Way’s heart. Below is the globular star cluster Omega Centauri in what might be the best portraiture ever taken of the region.

[ESO]

A black hole with a mass of 55 million suns

The black hole at the center of Centaurus A weighs in at 55 million suns and is the likely source of the huge gamma ray bubbles spotted by the Fermi Large Area Telescope last year, scientists said.

The black hole is invisible in a radio image of the galactic core, but the jets are quite apparent, making Centaurus A look like a spinning top. The jets feed huge lobes of radio-emitting gas, which also reach far beyond the visible galaxy.

To make this picture, scientists combined data from observatories on four continents: the Australian Long Baseline Array, the Hartebeesthoek antennae in South Africa, the 6 m Transportable Integrated Geodetic Observatory in Chile, and the 9 m German Antarctic Receiving Station in O’Higgins, Antarctica.

This is neat because scientists have never seen a galaxy at such high resolution before. Understanding how these jets radiate could help astronomers learn how black holes function and contribute to the apparently ubiquitous gamma radiation permeating the cosmos.

Astrophotographer Alan Friedman captured this shot at a star party in the Florida Keys last week, using a fairly small amateur telescope. His website has a whole collection of space snapshots and more boiling sun photos like this one. Click through to Bad Astronomy for a nice description of how it was done.

See the two sunspots beneath the puff? The little one, to the right, is twice the size of Earth.

[Averted Imaginationvia Bad Astronomy]