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"Winking" Star Thought to Harbor a Disk

Posted by Hemos on from the haboring-disks dept.

Betelgeuse writes "CNN has a story about a group of astronomers, led by William Herbst and Catrina Hamilton at the astronomy department of Wesleyan University that have detected an eclipsing disk around a young star. As someone who helped take the observations as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, it's pretty exciting to see that small telescopes can still have a place in modern astronomy. More information can be found here."

9 comments

  1. Small scopes by littlerubberfeet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, Keck, Hubble and the other large ones are good for some projects, but we just don't have the capacity on those to do the routine observations of stars and phenomina. Also, 'less important' and personal projects have to be persued on smaller telescopes, along with teaching.

    Solution: well, of course we could build more scopes, but given the cost of Keck, that is not possible. Other solution: double up on observations. Different recievers can be attached to a telescope. IR, ultra-violet and visible can be observed at the same time. So why not double up one projects that are located in the same space in the sky. Also, with image enhancement, you can look at a wider section of sky and view multiple objects, while using computers to examen your specific project.

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    1. Re:Small scopes by dpp · · Score: 1
      Other solution: double up on observations. Different recievers can be attached to a telescope. IR, ultra-violet and visible can be observed at the same time.

      Not easily: much of the UV window is very strongly absorbed by the atmosphere, so you can't use it from ground-based telescopes anyway and have to use spacecraft. It's also not so easy to observe two wavelengths at once: you need a lot of complicated optics, and you don't want to waste any of those precious photons. In addition, if the wavelengths are very different, you could have very different design requirements on the rest of the telescope.

      So why not double up one projects that are located in the same space in the sky.

      They'd have to be really close in the sky. It works for some projects where you're looking at a sample of objects in a patch of sky, like the Hubble Deep Field. However, for many instruments on telescopes like the Keck and Subaru, the field of view is less than 30 arcminutes, which is only the angular diameter of the full moon. Also, the instrument and observing mode you use are strongly dependent on exactly what sort of object you are investigating, and how, and may not be suitable for anything else that happens to be in the field of view.

      Also, with image enhancement, you can look at a wider section of sky and view multiple objects, while using computers to examen your specific project.

      Image processing and general number-crunching are essential to astronomers already, in order to transform raw data into a final image ("data reduction"). I spent the majority of my Ph.D. working on ways to process a particular type of data, so we're already doing what we can. :-)

      Essentially, research-class telescopes are all oversubscribed, and so people tend to make whatever optimisations they can already.

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      This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
    2. Re:Small scopes by uncoveror · · Score: 1

      You can see a lot with a small scope if you get away from city lights. A lot of discoveries have been made by amateur astronomers. Besides astronomy being a good nerdy hobby, having a telescope can also be usful in the city for voyerism!

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    3. Re:Small scopes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Could I use one to look at the Beowulf Cluster?
      How about Uranus?

    4. Re:Small scopes by littlerubberfeet · · Score: 0

      The AC above has a good point. Beowulf clusters of visual telescopes are becoming a reality, like with radio telescopes. Linking several together gives you a theoretical mirror many hundereds of miles wide.

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    5. Re:Small scopes by dpp · · Score: 1
      Linking several together gives you a theoretical mirror many hundereds of miles wide.

      Whilst you can do this at radio wavelengths, and have baselines (the separation between individual telescopes) the size of continents as with the VLBA, it is more difficult at optical wavelengths. This is essentially because the much shorter wavelengths make for much tighter tolerances in combining the signals. As far as I know, the current state of the art gives separations of only about 100 metres, rather than miles. See for example COAST and Optical Long Baseline Interferometry News.

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  2. A disk? by The+FooMiester · · Score: 1

    Would this disk happen to be supported by 4 elephants on the back of a turtle?

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