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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."
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.
To learn more about this work and to develop the background that would satisfy your curiosity, I suggest taking the time to do some research, e.g. by checking out the websites for the principles involved in this project. There's also some excellent cosmological primers available on the web that go over some of this stuff; see e.g. Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial (here and especially here) as well as Wayne Hu's Introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background.
To go through your concerns one by one:
1. The U.S., in concert with other nations, already maintains an extensive set of scientific facilities in Antarctica, in the form of permanent bases at the South Pole and at McMurdo Sound and Palmer Station. These facilities are manned and operated year-round. Their purpose is to provide logistical support for the scores of short- and long-term scientific projects that take place in Antarctica, such as the one described in this article. In other words, the issue of logistical support for such a project in Antarctica really isn't an issue; an entire organizational/logistical apparatus has been running for many years to provide this capability for science as a whole, and they'll only be one of many projects each year that will take advantage of it.
2. There is already a significant amount of observational evidence for the presence of what's referred to here as "dark energy." One hint of the presence of such an energy component to the Universe comes from trying to reconcile two observations: the first is that cosmic microwave background data indicates that the large-scale geometry of space is flat; the second is that the matter density of the universe (both in baryons, or normal matter, and in unknown dark matter, not to be confused with "dark energy"), measured via a broad variety of techniques, can only provide about 20% of the mass-energy density required to make the large-scale geometry be as flat as is observed. What's the other 80%? If it can't be matter of some sort, then what is it? When this is combined with recent observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating -- something only possible if such a "dark energy" component to the mass-energy density of the universe is present -- one is forced to take this possibility seriously. (there's a lot more to be said about this issue, but only if someone cares)
3. The telescope will not solely look at one spot on the sky.
4. Lighting is not really an issue; this is not a visible light telescope, but rather a microwave telescope. There are significant noise issues that will have to be confronted in the data analysis, but not really from day vs. night problems.
> 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.
WTF is it with americans mispelling Antarctica??
...Americans, misspell, misspelt... And by the way, "brain-dead" should be hyphenated.
Americans should be capitalized and it's spelled "misspelling".
Its been mentioned here a few times in the last several weeks (like that poll, etc), and it has ALWAYS been mispelt!
"It's" is the contraction "It has" and should contain an apostrophe. Again, the word is "misspelt", not "mispelt".
even have some american sci-fi shows and stuff here on dvd (i'm australian) and even on THERE they mispronounce Antarctica, saying it as "Antartica" just as they spell it.
"I'm" and "Australian" should be capitalized. You got it right for Anartica though. Kudos.
Are americans so brain dead they ALWAYS have to mispell it, and pronounce it the mispelt way too?
Great flame. Very effective.
significant noise issues
Actually, that's the best reason I can see to put a radio telescope down there. Having all the array cold will decrease the thermal noise generated by the array itself. Even though it's an rf instrument, and nominally doesn't care about light, I'd expect it to do its best work in July.
Remember, down there they don't have that pesky ozone layer to obscure their view! :)
GMD
watch this
"This will be the largest bolometric array yet built,"
Bolometric: (bo-lo-met-ric) (1) A Standard unit of Mass, based upon a Mark I Bolo (Manufactured by GM's BOLO Division). For instance, a Bolo Mark XXXIII weighs in at 32,000 tons (U.S.) or a much more reasonable 213 Bolos.
Which then begs the question; Is this the standard unit of measure for Dark Energy also?
(Sorry, I even left my desk before posting this, but I couldn't resist.)
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