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Gas Clouds As Giant Telescopes
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."
People always reported seeing visions when I farted, but I never knew there was a scientific basis for their claims!
--sdem
Will we be able to focus on something of our choosing, not just something that happens to be on the other side of a gas cloud?
...
Extracting data from these requires as many monitoring facilities and personnel as a real telescope. If you call this a telescope budget cutters will claim we don't need to build new hardware out of the federal budget.
Sure, they might be able to see things in super-fine detail. But how often is there going to be a gas cloud that acts as a perfect lens for whatever you want to look at?
It's still a cool idea, however.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
So that seemingly made up excuse for the explosion of the truck in MIB caused by light reflecting off of some gas is now about to be a reality.
SIGFAULT
Read the article. The effect is caused by scattering and descattering energy, it doesn't have anything to do with gravity.
demi
Slashdot links to story about some pretty fascinating science and the highest rated comment is a fart joke.
Somehow I am not surprised.
Read the article - it's not gravity that creates the telescopic effect.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
NASA requests 4.2 bazillion (USD) to fly out there and fix the optics...
signatures are for fools with hands
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.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
I'm so glad they included those giant 5mb copies of the images. Those puny little jpegs just weren't enough to explain the process to me. If there's no scrollbar, it's too small.
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
I was recently reading in Astronomer Monthly magazine that scientists now believe they can get usable signals from Voyager, long after they should be too faint, because they are amplified by the giant gas cloud that hovers around Uranus.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Picard: "Geordi, do we still have the power left to do this?"
Geordi: "I suppose it's possible.....I'll need to divert power from the shields and possibly redirect the conduits to decks 10 through 20, but yes, it can be done"
*10 seconds of silence pass while the rest of the officers shoot uneasy glances towards one another*
Picard: "Make it so. Number one, join me in the ready room...."
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.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Feh. Sounds like vaporware to me.
The first person to make a joke about, err, 'human produced' gas clouds should receive a lifetime ban from Slashdot. After me, that is...
you'd have to know the structure of the gas cloud down to its minute detail? How in hell do you find out that?
For instance how do you calculate the thickness of the gas cloud between the earth and this quasar its supposedly magnifying in on? As the thickness of the clous would affect the radio waves of the quasar more than a thinner gas cloud. Whats the yardstick to measure the gas cloud?
I've been using a technique similar to this in my own research for years, except on a microscopic scale... I know, I know, microscopy sounds like a completely different field from astonomy, but they share surprising similarities. In both sciences, we use powerful instruments to see what we can't see with the naked eye. A telescope is a powerful magnifier whose focal point is at infinity, since for all intents and purposes the stars are infinitely far away. A microscope is like a telescope except its focal point is a few millmeters to a few hundred microns. Therefore, both instruments can take advantage of the same optical techniques.
In microscopy, the limiting resolution is the scattering of light due to small air or water currents (depending on what your speciman is submersed in)--the effects are similar to twinkling stars caused by Earth's atmosphere. Sometimes you can evacuate the sample chamber and remove the effect, but this isn't practical for biological or aqeous specimans.
Therefore, a technique called "reverse diffraction engineering" is used to remove the scattering effects. Powerful software is needed to analyze the subtle image changes over time. The software then digitally removes the scattered light and creates an image with a much higher resolution.
A similar technique is being used to effectively remove the atmosphere above earth based telescopes, creating a "vacuum column" above them. I don't have a link, but this technique was demonstrated last year at a European observatory. A full blown telescope is in the works. This technique could render the Hubbel telescope, and the need to put telescopes in space, obsolete.
Beans and beans over beans. :)
The gas cloud technique will hopefully allow increase the resolution of the radio images. Most radio telescope images tend not to make "pretty pictures" of the type produced by Hubble and other optical telescopes. However, any increase in the detail that can be seen of the radio jets should be very useful. There is still much that is not understood about the processes the generate the jets.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
and the really interesting part is that we could not possibly have ever done this without the processing power and algorithms we have nowadays.
;-)
If these things keep improving...holy moley....now, for the first time in history, processing power is one of the strongest points in observations, rather than telescope resolution, light gathering power, or spectrum bandwidth.
We need to get better scopes in orbit. Combine that with computer processing and... Wow.
The future is so bright....I need lead shielding
I haven't been that active in watching advances in astronomy for the last couple years, but what we're doing nowadays with 20 year old tech (HST (admittedly somewhat upgraded) and more modern ground telescopes is astounding. We've learned more in the last 10 years than we learned in the previous 200. Astounding. Astonishing. I wish I could have beat graduate level calculus, so I could be doing this for a career.
Wow.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Anyway, this news is absolutely fabulous. Nobody has been asking though about how applicable this might be in general astronomy, for example how much of the sky could be covered with this technique, and whether anything like this effect could be created with manmade gaseous clouds.
At the very least, does anyone have a link to the original scientific draft? I am curious about how extensive these clouds are, and whether we can just "dial in" any part of the sky which is covered by such a cloud for a significant portion of the year. In particular would this be something that could be used to get images of extrasolar planets? Who cares what wavelength, the new European lunar probe is going to use X-rays to see what elements are available, maybe we can do the same with these clouds? Only problem is the targets will obviously be more than 50 light years away in this case.
Oh - It's Uranus.
When I was on an island research station last summer, I was astounded to walk out of the building one morning and see waves crashing against the base of a lighthouse, 20 miles away on the edge of the horizon. Something about the air had magnified the distant object so that I could see it with the naked eye. Ever since then I've wondered if it was possible to make an extremely powerful telescope by using gas. It's easy to get magnification by changing eyepieces, but the hard part is getting a nice wide primary lens/mirror to collect light and keep the image from getting blurry. A gas lens would solve that problem by using a huge bubble of heated air -- if you could get it to hold its shape well enough. This isn't exactly the same thing, since it uses radio refraction through charged particles rather than light refraction through air, but I'd like to imagine that it's a start.