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NASA Takes Step Forward In Planet Finding
Spy der Mann wrote to mention a piece at Physorg.com about a major breakthrough in planet finding. From the article: "On a crystal clear, star-filled night at Hawaii's Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, NASA engineers successfully suppressed the blinding light of three stars, including the well-known Vega, by 100 times. This breakthrough will enable scientists to detect the dim dust disks around stars, where planets might be forming. Normally the disks are obscured by the glare of the starlight. Engineers accomplished this challenging feat with the Keck Interferometer, which links the observatory's two 10-meter (33-feet) telescopes. By combining light from the telescopes, the Keck Interferometer has a resolving power equivalent to a football-field sized telescope. The 'technological touchdown' of blocking starlight was achieved by adding an instrument called a 'nuller.' "
I've replicated the same feat at home using a device I call a "lens cap", except I can significantly beat the 100x reduction of star brightness.
I'll entertain all bids on this technology...
When will we get all our instruments to examine space...in space? I can't imagine a scientific reason to look from the crust of a planet for anything in deep space.
a beowulf clust... oh, sorry... Just had to do it!
Not much detail on the interferometer... is it like umask for light?
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Awww, and I had my luck pinned on my small, 8'' homemade Dobsonian. Second trial run was tonight, and I had expected to find the next Planet Earth! FYI anyhow, it's really easy + inexpensive to make your own telescope... and find the next E-type Tw2002 colonizable planet!!! ~d
The 'technological touchdown' of blocking starlight was achieved by adding an instrument called a 'nuller.' "
Once again, the importance of nul terminating is illustrated.
A bit of unfortunate news: I recently read in an article that the ice cap on top of the high peak of Mauna Kea has been melting, as a result of global warming.
As the ice cap melts, the foundations of many observatories, Keck being one of them, is starting to shift, and they may have to be abandoned in a few years. What a great setback to science that could be.
...did they receive prime-number transmissions, encoded with an audio/video sideband signal?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Can we use the "nuller" to remove the offending glare from the fake teeth, fake breasts, overdone cosmetic surgeries and massive egos of the Hollywood "stars"?
So did those smarty scientists figure out a distinction for planets, then? Is Pluto a real planet or not? I can't believe I missed this! Heh, I figured news that the criteria for what makes a body a planet is set would have been duped twice by now.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
The question I have to ask is why are we looking for planets?! It's almost as if we've totally leapfrogged the part where we actually find a way to get INTO space and TO planets. It's like we're kids looking through the window of a bar wanting to taste beer. Instead of looking at beer and wondering if it tastes good, we kids should be forging some fake id's and finding out for ourselves.
set OS=Microsoft
I suggest you read Slashdot
Article is here. I haven't tried this myself, it looks like a lot of work.
Finally, since I haven't seen a one sentence synopsis, a nulling interferometer does a careful job making the on-axis starlight received by two telescopes interfere destructively, while off-axis light from circumstellar emission passes through the system. This instrument is designed to study dust emission analogous to the zodiacal light in our own solar system.
A "nuller" AKA bluetack.
Ok, this is a great result. It does not however deal with the question of planets which have disappeared. Go read the Wikipedia entries on Dyson spheres and Matrioshka Brains. There should be an abundance out there of planets which we cannot see including some which may explain the "dark matter". I am *not* interested in the evidence that gets us to where we are. I am here, I know that works. I am interested in the evidence that suggests where we are going to go.
I always wondered how /dev/null worked. Now I get it. It's a black hole.. nothing escapes it, no naughty data files, not even light!
Come to think about it, in databases, nulls usually give me my fair share of headaches. Finally, another good use of the null beast!
6d
I wondered why they were teaming up with Google... now it makes sense...
Unless the people in them were, for some reason too advanced for us to know how, storing the energy emitted by the star, a Dyson sphere would be re-emitting all the energy emitted by the star, but at a lower temperature. Therefore, Dyson spheres should be visible in infrared.
It's already built into most TVs.
:)
Simply press the button labeled "power" on your TV when you're sick of seeing these things. Works like a champ!
Looks like Blue Blockers really work. And here I was thinking $40 for a pair of sunglasses was a ripoff.
D
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Dobson didn't invent anything! Alt-Az mounts have been around for hundreds of years! At least say you have a 8" NEWTONIAN on a Dobsonian mount!
Wow, don't go out on a limb or anything...
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
On a crystal clear, star-filled night at Hawaii's Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, NASA engineers successfully suppressed the blinding light of three stars, including the well-known Vega, by 100 times.
Montgomery Burns: "Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun!"
Wow, planet finding, so that's what NASA was hookin' up with Google for...
What you posted could be restated as follows, losing none of the relevant information, and being 100x easier to read:
"A nulling interferometer does what the moon does during a solar eclipse -- it blocks out the starlight, although instead of simply blocking the light, it removes it using a light interference technique. And just as a total eclipse allows us to view the normally-obscured faint detail around the edge of the sun, a nuller allows astronomers to see the fainter objects around a star that would otherwise be outshone."
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
until we send a probe to Uranus. Then we'll insert it in Uranus orbit.
Right now this is something only astronomers are really interested in. It's kind of sneaking under the radar of the public at large. They are going to get a big shock someday. When the first truly Earth-like planet is discovered, with unambiguous signs of a living biosphere (for example, lots of free oxygen in the atmosphere), the psychological impact will be huge.
You don't think so? You think it can't really matter because visiting such a planet, or even sending a robot probe, is too far beyond our capabilities? Logically that may be true, but there's more than logic at work.
Try to imagine what it was like when Galileo pointed his primitive telescope skyward and realized planets weren't mere specks of light -- there were worlds up there! Even though nobody had any idea how to reach them, everyone's view of the universe had to change. From Galileo's time right up through the early 20th century, imaginations ran wild, and every celestial sphere was imagined to be inhabited. There were jungles on Venus, canals on Mars!
In the last 60 years or so, in some ways our view of the universe has regressed. Now we've looked around our solar system, and it's been a bit of a letdown. Mere specks of light have been replaced by barren balls of rock, or ice, or gas. In their minds, people have started sliding outer space back into the category of the uninteresting and unimportant.
When the first news comes back of an Earth-like planet. . . when one is shown to have life. . . when we get a fuzzy image of another cloud-swirled blue marble out there somewhere. . . It'll be just like Galileo all over again. Nobody will have any clear idea how to reach those worlds, but imaginations will run wild. And I think that's a good thing.
But does it run Linux?
For those of us who aren't American, just how big is a "football-field size"? (Yes, I can Google for it, but for fuck's sake, you might crash fewer space probes if you used "metres" instead of "football fields" as a unit of measure. Just a thought.)
If you have tried to read any of the derivations for the image at the focus of an interferometer, it reduces to a Fourier transform.
For a quick "hack", you can see what a point-source looks like if you just use the (2 dimensional) FFT, with two circles separated the right distance as input. (with appropriate sampling, oversampling, etc)
I find this way of looking at it quite elegant, not to mention the ease in writing the simulation code (barely any). In other words, the interferometer setup is equivalent to a big giant circular (or annular) telescope aperture, masked out, leaving two circular holes.
Partner with Google. Then:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=new+plane
Easy!
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Couldn't they have come up with a better name?
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
NullPointerException
... until you realize that it takes about 10,000x greater reduction in light from the parent star to actually spot Earth sized planets in other Solar Systems. It's a good first step, but they have a long way to go.
Besides the obvious 10 year delay mandated by government beaurocracy, they seemed to be running that thing since 2000 without the interferometer. It's hard to believe it took so long to get just one image from the interferometer. Not even going to bother finding the actual image on the internet.
... man has yearned to destroy the Sun.
That must be some pretty fancy technology there, to suppress the light output of an entire star. The military will be interested in this stellar fusion regulator.
So you're saying that transhumanism will render the whole issue moot.
Actually. . . If I'm not mistaken it was church doctrine that the heavenly bodies -- including the sun and moon -- were perfect creations. The dark and light areas on the moon were assumed to be a blurry image of the Earth reflecting from the moon's flawless mirror surface. The various "seas", craters, and other lunar features weren't recognized and named until after the telescope came along.