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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.' "
It is a good father-son hobby. I built my own 8" newtonian about 27 years ago, dad and I spent a lot of time grinding the mirror, heading down to Meade to buy parts, eyepieces, an equatorial mount, etc. I learned more about my father during that nine month project than I had in my previous sixteen years of existence on this ball of dirt we call the earth.
:-)
We had many years of eyepiece time enjoying and documenting our observations
I still have that telescope, and I think of my recently-departed father whenver I use it.
Oh, yeah, we both learned early on not to drink and grind optics.
-Scott
My other sig is a Glock
There are instruments. From the Great Observatories and the Cosmic Origins projects. The problem though is that it took nearly 25 years for Spitzer to get off the ground and into orbit. The total life time cost is around $1.5 billion. $640-750 million for the satellite and then about roughly the same to run it. It only talks through the DSN which makes things extremly expensive. DI has one of the largetst telescopes that went to 'deep' space and that wan't cheap either. Right now it is on itsway back to earth and a parking orbit. Other than that no science being done. Why? Money. Once again running on the DSN, takes a lot of cash. The former runs at 20MHz and the latter about 115MHz. One uses flash the other didn't 'cause there was no rad-hard flash during design. The tech on the planet is not that same that can be used in space reliably. Forget about all of those assumptions in your calculation you better have the modeling down otherwise you're fscked.
So really the cost is a prohibiting factor as is the technology, not the desire to have telescopes in space.
Can this be programmed into cheap telescopes for well known light sources?
Is this the answer to light pollution?
I'm guessing that the answer is "no" and "no", respectively, but I'd be interested to find out why not.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
It's not just about finding a planet.
Despite what people may think, the evolution of stars are still not completely understood. Esp, how do stars affect their neighboring environment? To answer the question, it is important to *look* at their immediate surroundings. But that's hard to do, since the stars themselves are blindingly bright and overwhelms the fainter features around them (e.g., you can't see coronae with your naked eyes, unless the sun itself is eclipsed).
This technique would allow us to study the surroundings of stars. And that can be quite useful.
Now, I note that such technique has been used before else where. But not at Keck. It is difficult to do with the Keck because its twin telescopes employ a set of fragmented mirrors, which in turn makes it very difficult to achieve interference (those mirrors generate some phase mismatches, which kill the interference).
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.
Agreed and this is what Dyson actually suggested. But our abilities to observe in the infrared are so poor that it is difficult to imagine a situation in which we would observe them. As Minsky pointed out at the Byurakan conference the most advanced civilizations will radiate heat at a temperature slightly above the CMB. So how would you propose we detect them?
Dyson made one mistake due to the era in which he was thinking. He presumed that "intelligence" must be operating at a liquid water temperatures. Given our current understanding of computers it is quite reasonable for that restriction to be significantly relaxed. The range of "intelligence" operation is from several thousand degrees to nearly the CMB. Clearly computers do not currently span that range but we understand the principles that would allow them to do so. And we can enable such operation.