I work at UChicago (Carlstrom, the professor here, is my advisor). For more information about CMB polarisation, I reccomend Wayne Hu's (a theorists) webpages at http://background.uchicago.edu.
He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated, if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.
You can actually see a number of geostationary
spy satallites with just a regular 35mm SLR.
Just point it up at the sky, open the shutter
and wait. The satallites will actually be the
little white dots that don't move, and the stars
will all rotate around the celestial pole.
IAAAR -- I am an astronomy researcher. (An advanced undergraduate, but I've been doing it for 4 years and get paid for it.)
Just a tibit of correction. The VLT is not in New Mexico. You're thinking of the VLA - the very large array, run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The VLT is in Chile and run by the European Space Organization.
The VLT is an optical telescope, and they are designed to do optical interferometry with 4 telescopes, but I'm not sure that this has been done yet. The VLA is an radio telescope, and interferotetry has been done with radio waves for decades. Essentially, the difficulty goes with the length of the wavelenght. I.e. the longer the wavelength, the more room for error you have when you stack the signals. That's why its possible to stack nearly 30 signals at the VLA, but we're only doing 2 or 4 in the optical.
This is really quite an achievement. And no, you don't 'listen' to the radio telescopes like Ms. Foster did in Cotact...
Also, Gemini is a joint project among *many* countries, spearheaded by the group here in the US. I'm not even sure ESO is a part of it. The members are Chile, US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, UK, and Argentina. Please check your facts before you do this sort of ting.
By the way, the OWL is a concept telescope which has yet to be developed and probably won't be for a decade or two. You are right, however, in your general ideas, but bear in mind that even what they are doing at Keck is very difficult, and it will be years before Gemini starts operating as an interferometer (and even so, I'm not sure if it's equipped to do it yet). Right now, Gemini is just starting individual science observations.
It really is an exciting time to be doing astronomy, professional or otherwise.
This is not how these particular black holes disappeared.
Think about it, the mass of a proton, say is on the order of 10^-27kg. The mass of a small black hole is on the order of a few solar masses. One solar mass is 10^30kg. This is a difference of 57(!) orders of magnitude. That is, you have 10^57 protons in a 1 solar mass blackhole. Compare this to the fact that the Universe is only 10^17 seconds old.
Even if the particles are entirely protons (which they are not, most are much smaller), you would have to be losign particles at an incredible rate just to have this thing evaportate on the Hubble time, much less on a fraction of that. Hawking radiation dosen't even come close to that.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at UChicago (Carlstrom, the professor here, is my advisor). For more information about CMB polarisation, I reccomend Wayne Hu's (a theorists) webpages at http://background.uchicago.edu.
He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated,
if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people
have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.
This really is an exciting timne in cosmology.
You can actually see a number of geostationary
spy satallites with just a regular 35mm SLR.
Just point it up at the sky, open the shutter
and wait. The satallites will actually be the
little white dots that don't move, and the stars
will all rotate around the celestial pole.
You really don't need a bit scope for this.
Just a tibit of correction. The VLT is not in New Mexico. You're thinking of the VLA - the very large array, run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The VLT is in Chile and run by the European Space Organization.
The VLT is an optical telescope, and they are designed to do optical interferometry with 4 telescopes, but I'm not sure that this has been done yet. The VLA is an radio telescope, and interferotetry has been done with radio waves for decades. Essentially, the difficulty goes with the length of the wavelenght. I.e. the longer the wavelength, the more room for error you have when you stack the signals. That's why its possible to stack nearly 30 signals at the VLA, but we're only doing 2 or 4 in the optical.
This is really quite an achievement. And no, you don't 'listen' to the radio telescopes like Ms. Foster did in Cotact...
Also, Gemini is a joint project among *many* countries, spearheaded by the group here in the US. I'm not even sure ESO is a part of it. The members are Chile, US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, UK, and Argentina. Please check your facts before you do this sort of ting.
By the way, the OWL is a concept telescope which has yet to be developed and probably won't be for a decade or two. You are right, however, in your general ideas, but bear in mind that even what they are doing at Keck is very difficult, and it will be years before Gemini starts operating as an interferometer (and even so, I'm not sure if it's equipped to do it yet). Right now, Gemini is just starting individual science observations.
It really is an exciting time to be doing astronomy, professional or otherwise.
Do you have a reference for this?
Think about it, the mass of a proton, say is on the order of 10^-27kg. The mass of a small black hole is on the order of a few solar masses. One solar mass is 10^30kg. This is a difference of 57(!) orders of magnitude. That is, you have 10^57 protons in a 1 solar mass blackhole. Compare this to the fact that the Universe is only 10^17 seconds old.
Even if the particles are entirely protons (which they are not, most are much smaller), you would have to be losign particles at an incredible rate just to have this thing evaportate on the Hubble time, much less on a fraction of that. Hawking radiation dosen't even come close to that.