@the-science-llama / the-science-llama.tumblr.com
listen up, this is some important science: have you heard the names of the European Southern Observatory’s telescopes?
first they have one called the VLT, which stands for the Very Large Telescope
then they have one called the E-ELT, which stands for the European Extremely Large Telescope
keep stepping it up, ESO, keep steppin’ it up
Stars of the constellation Ursa Major (the Big bear) form the familiar dipper-like asterism in the northern sky as photographed from the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Canary island of La Palma.
The starry night sky is reflected from one of a pair of 17 meter diameter, multi-mirrored MAGIC telescopes. The MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) telescope is intended to observe gamma rays indirectly by detecting brief flashes of optical light, called -Cherenkov light. — Babak Tafreshi
Planetary Resources, the Planetary Society, and The Museum of Flight are partnering in the crowd sourcing of a “Space Telescope for Everyone.” And the perks are amazing and, frankly, cheap. $25 for a picture of yourself in space. $200 for the ability to photograph an astronomical object from an observatory in space.
I purchased package that gives time on the telescope to a classroom as well as curricula and other resources.
These are opportunities that not only didn’t exist until recently, they COULDN’T EXIST! Without the cultural concept of crowd funding and the technological progress in optics and computing, this would literally be impossible.
In fact, it still seems a little bit impossible to me…but these people are very very serious…and the cooles thing is that they’re serious about making the world a better place, educating future scientists, and building an optimistic, abundant future. This is a pretty inspiring place to be…and a pretty inspiring time to exist.
YES, do it for SCIENCE!! Or just help spread the word, that's cool too
How do telescopes let us see so far into space?
Everything you need to know about how telescopes work.
Why is your eye so bad at seeing things far away?
Human eyes can see long distances. In fact the Andromeda Galaxy can be seen with the naked eye and that’s 2.5 million light-years away. But even a massive galaxy, like Andromeda, appears to us as a tiny point in the sky.
It makes sense that as an object gets further away it becomes harder to see. But why this happens helps us understand how vital telescopes have been in exploring the universe.
As an object gets further away less of its light will reach your eye. The image takes up less space on your retina (the light-sensitive tissue at the back of your eye), making the image smaller. This makes details of the image harder to see.
Do bigger lenses give us a bigger image?
To make a distant object appear brighter and larger, we effectively need a bigger eye to collect more light. With more light we can create a brighter image, we can then magnify the image so that it takes up more space on our retina.
The big lens in the telescope (objective lens) collects much more light than your eye can from a distant object and focuses the light to a point (the focal point) inside the telescope.
A smaller lens (eyepiece lens) takes the bright light from the focal point and magnifies it so that it uses more of your retina.
A telescope’s ability to collect light depends on the size of the objective lens, which is used to gather and focus light from a narrow region of sky.
The eye piece magnifies the light collected by the objective lens, like a magnifying glass magnifies words on a page. But the performance of a telescope depends almost entirely on the size of the objective lens, sometimes called the aperture.
What’s the big problem with refracting telescopes?
If you’ve ever seen light bend through a prism you probably have an idea of where the problem lies with a refracting telescope; it’s the lens.
When light travels through glass it slows down, that’s why it bends. Lenses are shaped perfectly to bend light in particular ways. But the amount light bends depends on the wavelength, or colour, of the light.
White light is a mixture of all colours, from red to violet. Red light bends the least and violet light bends the most.
When white light travels through the objective lens, the different colours bend at different angles and are focused at slightly different points. Different coloured images are misaligned creating a blurry image with fringes of colour along the boundaries that separate dark and bright parts.
Can telescopes with mirrors correct the problem?
Reflecting telescopes magnify distant objects using the same principle: more light is collected and focused to a point and this is magnified so that it fills your field of vision.
But instead of using a lens, a curved mirror (primary mirror) collects the light and reflects it to a focus. Because light doesn’t pass through the mirror, it doesn’t bend the different colours by different amounts, the way a refracting lens does.
A small mirror (secondary mirror) is placed in the path of light from the primary mirror to reflect the image towards the eyepiece. The secondary mirror must be very small so that it doesn’t block the light from the distant object as it travels to the primary mirror.
Another benefit of using mirrors instead of lenses is that big mirrors are easier and cheaper to make than big lenses. Reflecting telescopes can be much larger and therefore look deeper into space.
Are radio telescope like big reflecting telescopes?
Radio waves aren’t just for listening to your favourite songs, they occur naturally all over the universe. In fact, they are a special type of light that humans can’t see. They can be found emanating from clouds of gas where stars are born, as well as the centres of galaxies.
Many strong sources of radio waves are invisible in normal light, so looking at radio waves reveals a completely different picture of our universe. Even objects like the Sun and planets can reveal new features when viewed with radio telescopes, like Jodrell Bank.
Radio waves are also better at travelling long distances than shorter wavelengths, so we can get clearer signals from very distant objects in radio than we can in normal light.
The large dish acts like the primary mirror in a reflecting telescope, but it needs to be much larger to reflect the long wavelength radio waves. These are reflected up to a smaller mirror which reflects the images back to a receiver. The information from the receiver is then processed by computers to create colour images which we can see.
Source: BBC.co.uk
Precisely what went on in my mind the first time I viewed Saturn/Jupiter. This. Deep astronomy feels.
This was the exact feeling I had when I brought it into focus. It was a little blurry but I could make out the gaps between the rings and the planet, so fucking cool!
Saturn is still pretty close in its orbit relative to us (Opposition - April 28) so go outside and check it out while it is still close and bright. It will be near the Libra and Virgo constellations in the Southeast.
Explore Chandra’s interactive site about Telescopes & Light here. You can read about the different types of wavelengths of light and also learn about how different telescopes, in space and on Earth, used by NASA, and other space agencies, image parts of our universe using the ability to see these varied wavelengths.
A telescope for each band of electromagnetic radiation being spewed from the universe in our direction.
Observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show that the most vigorous bursts of star birth in the cosmos took place much earlier than previously thought. The results are published in a set of papers to appear in the journal Nature on 14 March 2013, and in the Astrophysical Journal. The research is the most recent example of the discoveries coming from the new international ALMA observatory, which celebrates its inauguration today.
The most intense bursts of star birth are thought to have occurred in the early Universe, in massive, bright galaxies. These starburst galaxies convert vast reservoirs of cosmic gas and dust into new stars at a furious pace — many hundreds of times faster than in stately spiral galaxies like our own galaxy, the Milky Way. By looking far into space, at galaxies so distant that their light has taken many billions of years to reach us, astronomers can observe this busy period in the Universe’s youth.
The international team of researchers first discovered these distant and enigmatic starburst galaxies with the US National Science Foundation’s 10-metre South Pole Telescope (SPT) and then used ALMA to zoom in on them to explore the stellar baby boom in the young Universe. They were surprised to find that many of these distant dusty star-forming galaxies are even further away than expected. This means that, on average, their bursts of star birth took place 12 billion years ago, when the Universe was just under 2 billion years old — a full billion years earlier than previously thought.
Two of these galaxies are the most distant of their kind ever seen — so distant that their light began its journey when the Universe was only one billion years old. What’s more, in one of these record-breakers, water is among the molecules detected, marking the most distant observations of water in the cosmos published to date.
The team used the unrivalled sensitivity of ALMA to capture light from 26 of these galaxies at wavelengths of around three millimetres. Light at certain specific wavelengths can be produced by gas molecules in these galaxies, and the wavelengths are stretched by the expansion of the Universe over the billions of years that it takes the light to reach us. By measuring the stretched wavelengths, astronomers can calculate how long the light’s journey has taken, and place each galaxy at the right point in cosmic history.
For more: ESO.org
Credit: ESO/ALMA
Gravitational lensing is fucking awesome! Here is an artists rendition of the galaxy being warped by gravity
Telescope by Daniel Mc Glashin
The Birth of Violent Supernovae What you are seeing here is a rendering of a mock supernovae simulated by a supercomputer. The different colors are assigned to different entropy values as it measures the collapse of the core. Stars hundreds of times the size of our sun collapse to create supernovae and astronomers have used X-Ray detectors to identify the dying breaths of these massive stars. Astronomers measured excess x-rays coming from collapsing massive stars which signaled the presence of a 'supernova shockwave' exiting the star at first.
These are also known as gamma-ray bursts but it is surprising to find x-rays within the first instances of these bursts and because of this it could lead to telescopes - like the one on board the Swift Satellite - having an early warning system. Instead of telescopes focusing towards a burst a few hours to days after the event, now telescopes could potentially use this system to be able to focus towards the dying stars much faster. Read more
