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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."
> so how exactly will this telescope pinpoint "dark matter"
> any more than any other telescope? I mean, you don't really
> even know what you are looking for. Is it just that there
> is more night time to use it in, or is this just the only way
> they could sell this project.
Neither.
First of all, as an aside, when trying to learn about dark matter, there are some telescopes which are more useful than others; it depends on what you're trying to do. For example, attempting to map the dark matter distribution using weak gravitational lensing requires a telescope with a very wide field-of-view as well as excellent "seeing". The Hubble Space Telescope fails the first of those two conditions, while the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea has traditionally been an excellent telescope for such work.
But second, and more importantly, your question is off-base. The purpose of this telescope is not to investigate dark matter, but rather what's (unfortunately, imho) being referred to these days as "dark energy." If you were to talk to an old astronomer or a specialist in general relativity, they'd refer to it as "a cosmological constant" instead; if you were to speak with a particle theorist, they'd call it "vacuum energy density." The point here is to try to learn something about the energy density of empty space. That's a bizarre notion, I know; but there are particle physics reasons why you might think that such a thing wouldn't be zero, and astronomical observations that argue that we've already seen that it isn't zero. But those observations have been hard to do; there's a fair number of them, from different approaches, and they're generally quite consistent with each other, but it's still possible that they're wrong. And with something as counterintuitive as this, one would like the evidence to be still much stronger than it currently is. The observations this microwave telescope will do should come at this question from yet another angle, and with a fairly high degree of precision. And we'll see.