Space and astronomy news
The construction of the Vera C. Rubin observatory has just crossed a major milestone with the successful installation of its 3.5 meter diameter secondary mirror. The observatory is now one step closer to first light in 2025, when it will begin the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST): a mission to repeatedly image the entire sky, at high resolution, to create a time-lapse record of the Universe.
Continue reading “Rubin's Secondary Mirror is Installed”
To reach the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory, you take the road less traveled, winding through scenic and remote regions of the Allegheny Mountains and the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia. About an hour away, you’ll start to lose cell phone service. The Green Bank Observatory – a collection of radio telescopes that search the heavens for faint radio signals from black holes, pulsars, neutron stars or gravitational waves — sits near the heart of the United States National Radio Quiet Zone, a unique area the encompasses an area of approximately 13,000 square miles, spanning the border between Virginia and West Virginia.
Here in the NRQZ, human-generated radio transmissions are limited to shield the radio telescopes from Earth-based radio signals called RFI (Radio Frequency Interference), which are high-frequency electromagnetic waves that emanate from electronic devices such as computers, cell phones, microwave ovens, and even digital cameras. Even the weakest RFI signals can drown out the faint radio waves coming from the cosmos.
Continue reading “Part 2: The History and Future of Planetary Radar”
The Universe wants us to understand its origins. Every second of every day, it sends us a multitude of signals, each one a clue to a different aspect of the cosmos. But the Universe is the original Trickster, and its multitude of signals is an almost unrecognizable cacophony of light, warped, shifted, and stretched during its long journey through the expanding Universe.
Continue reading “Astronomers Propose a 14-Meter Infrared Space Telescope”
Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been hungering for better detectors. But the Earth is warm and seismically noisy, and that will always limit the effectiveness of Earth-based detectors.
Continue reading “Here’s Why We Should Put a Gravitational Wave Observatory on the Moon”
Some parts of the Universe only reveal important details when observed in radio waves. That explains why we have ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre-submillimetre Array, a collection of 7-meter and 12-meter radio telescopes that work together as an interferometer. But, ALMA-type arrays have their limitations, and astronomers know what they need to overcome those limitations.
They need a radio telescope that’s just one single, massive dish.
Continue reading “Astronomers Propose a 50-Meter Submillimeter Telescope”
Hubble and JWST are busily scanning the sky, sending home enormous amounts of data. They shift from target to target, completing the required observations.
But have you ever wondered what those two space telescopes are doing right at this moment? Now, you can do just that at the new Space Telescope Live website. It will show you what each observatory is scanning, where the objects are in the sky, and what researchers hope to learn. You can even go back or forward in time and see what each telescope has been looking at in the past or what observations are coming up.
Continue reading “Now You Can See Exactly Where Hubble and JWST are Pointed”
For decades, astronomers have said that one of the most optimal places to build large telescopes is on the surface of the Moon. The Moon has several advantages over Earth- and space-based telescopes that make it worth considering as a future home for giant observatories. A new paper lists all the advantages, including how telescopes on the lunar surface wouldn’t be blocked by an atmosphere or impacted by wind, and how the low gravity would allow gigantic structures to be built that could be upgraded over time by astronauts.
“Progress on the big questions in astronomy, such as life on certain exoplanets or dark matter, will ultimately require high angular resolution, a large collecting area and access to the full optical spectrum,” write French astronomers Jean Schneider, Pierre Kervella, and Antoine Labeyrie. “All astronomy will benefit from the advantages provided by the localization on the Moon.”
And even though it might be decades before we have a permanent presence on the Moon, the astronomers suggest we should start with small telescopes now.
Continue reading “What Kinds of Astronomy Could Be Done With a Telescope on the Moon?”
Can we secure our place in the Solar System? Not in any absolute sense because nature can be very unpredictable. But we can make the effort to safeguard our civilization by cataloguing potentially dangerous asteroids. An upcoming space telescope will help.
Continue reading “A New Space Telescope will Map the Universe and Help Protect the Earth from Asteroids”
Construction of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) reached a milestone, with the structure of the dome completed just enough where engineers were able to rotate the dome’s skeleton for the first time.
ESO released a timelapse video this week of the dome’s movement, sped up from the actual snail’s pace of 1 centimeter per second. When the telescope is completed – currently set for sometime in 2028 — the rotation of the dome will allow the telescope to track objects in the night sky over the Chilean Atacama desert. The final operating speed will be at pace of 5 kilometers per hour.
Take note of the size of the humans moving about on the video. They appear like tiny ants compared to the immense size of the aptly named ELT.
Continue reading “The Extremely Large Telescope’s Dome is on the Move”
The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is something special among telescopes. It’s not built for better angular resolution and increased resolving power like the European Extremely Large Telescope or the Giant Magellan Telescope. It’s built around a massive digital camera and will repeatedly capture broad, deep views of the entire sky rather than focus on any individual objects.
By repeatedly surveying the sky, the VRO will spot any changes or astronomical transients. Astronomers call this type of observation Time Domain Astronomy.
Continue reading “Vera Rubin Will Help Us Find the Weird and Wonderful Things Happening in the Solar System”