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Gas Clouds As Giant Telescopes

Posted by timothy on from the repurposing dept.

allrong writes "Astronomers have found a way to harness clouds of gas in space to make a natural 'telescope' more powerful than any manmade telescope currently in operation. Read the press release or take a look at the images and description of the process."

11 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:uh... by demi · · Score: 3, Informative

    Read the article. The effect is caused by scattering and descattering energy, it doesn't have anything to do with gravity.

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    demi
  2. Re:So? by digital+bath · · Score: 3, Informative

    Read the article - it's not gravity that creates the telescopic effect.

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  3. It�s a radiotelescope by gomoX · · Score: 5, Informative

    This idea is not like an optical telescope (kinda Hubble) that can take neat pictures.
    Its an effect that amplifies the radio emissions of a quasar or any other source of these which pass through the gas clouds so they can be more easily read here on earth.
    BTW, you could RTFA which is very short, I promise.

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    My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
  4. Yet Another.... by fatboyslack · · Score: 2, Informative

    thing to thank Australia for. Do we rock, or what? For a country with our population, we seriously fight out of our division.
    Hmm. A little off-topic?

    Actually, that the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation) is financially supported mainly (I believe) by the (Australian) federal government to find/discover/create/invent things that benefit Australia. Does this happen in other countries? Quite often I get the impression, especially with the good ol' US of A, that most discoveries/inventions are always by private companies, and little is supported by the Feds. Of course there NASA, but general scientific research?

    Enlighten me, I say.

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    Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
    1. Re:Yet Another.... by eupheric · · Score: 2, Informative

      The USA has the National Science Foundation, which funds quite a bit of research at the university and otherwise.

  5. Mirror of a images by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Right now the server is still fast.... but if that changes:

    I grabbed the large versions and set up some torrents for use with BitTorrent (a P2P download system that helps reduce bandwidth usage for servers). You can grab the full-sized figure 1 with text here and the the full-sized figure 2 with text here.

    Hopefully this will work properly ;)

  6. Re:Ok, but... by pVoid · · Score: 3, Informative
    Follow the link.

    It looks like they are going to extrapolate the original signals by measuring the same image while moving in different directions (thanks to earth's orbit). (I guess the assumption is that the glass clouds are immobile in shape and position).

    Doesn't seem to be a heretic claim.

  7. Re:Practicality? by Hegestratos · · Score: 4, Informative

    I just skimmed through the abstract of the article to be published, and I think the post on the front page is a bit disorienting. They're not using a bubble of gas the way one uses a lens (or mirror) in a telescope. Fat chance of getting a blob of gas aligned in between the object and you eye, and if that does happen purely by chance, then that blob is likely to be shaped unregularly, making a very, very poor lens.

    The big idea is that you can deduce extra information from what you see when a blob of gas passes in front of the object you're observing. Basically, the gas fudges the image in much the same way as the Earth's atmosphere does (called seeing) but on a longer timescale. The lack of atmosphere, as you all know, is why the Hubble is such a good telescope. If you know how the object you're observing was creamed, then possibly you can reconstruct the original from what you've observed. Extra information has to come from somewhere, and that means you're going to be observing for a long time to get some statistics together.

    I know it works for solar observations, since I've written code that does it myself. I can't find a good before and after example right now, but it's pretty impressive. I guess this will work. Neat.

    Alfred

  8. Re:THIS IS NOT A NEW TECHNIQUE! by pVoid · · Score: 4, Informative
    That telescope you speak of is the Keck Telescope, it is already functional, and yes, it blows hubble out of the water.

    Except what you are talking about is a different phenomenon: these people are using the gas clouds to actually amplify the signals they receive, not to decrease image noise. They *are* extrapolating in a similar way that you describe, but it's not because the earth's view is shrouded by a haze surrounding it...

    There is a sublte nuance there... A similar thing in microscopy would be to actually induce the air currents you speak of, and through a software analysis of the resulting image, obtain images that were bigger/brighter/whatever than if it were taken in absolute vaccum.

  9. Re:What gas clouds!? by PizzaFace · · Score: 2, Informative
    They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.
    The science curriculum in a lot of schools doesn't seem to have changed much since the 19th century. (Interstellar gas was discovered in 1904.) These pages will get you current.
  10. Re:Applicability to General Astronomy? by allrong · · Score: 2, Informative

    The paper is available at: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0211451

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