Antarctic Telescope Funded

An anonymous reader writes "SpaceflightNow reports that a multi-institutional team of scientists led by the University of Chicago will receive $16.6 million from the National Science Foundation over the next five years to build a telescope at the South Pole aimed at piercing one of the darkest secrets of the universe. The telescope will help scientists to reveal new details regarding a mysterious phenomenon called dark energy, which makes the expansion of the universe accelerate."

Comments

Re:expencive... is it worth it?

[evalhalla]

First of all: they're going to place it in an already working base, so they already have the facilities needed for people.

The answer to the "dark energy" matter could be something like: they don't know whether it exists or not, so they're trying to find out. Yes, the name sounds quite sci-fi, but it's only a name.

For the lighting: depending on the actual distance from the pole they may have days or months of 24 hours daylight, but they're also going to have days or months of 24 hours night, so in the end they get even. Anyway I don't know whether this is a kind of telescope that can work only during the night or not, so maybe this problem does not exists.

Maybe they're just using it during the "winter", when they have long nights and I suppose that other kind of scientist have less work, leaving space for them during the "summer", thus solving both the people and the lighting problem.