Slashdot Mirror
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
Slashdot links to story about some pretty fascinating science and the highest rated comment is a fart joke.
Somehow I am not surprised.
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...."
Feh. Sounds like vaporware to me.
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.