Telescope array will spy on spy satellites, star surfaces and black holes
At a time when astronomers are building billion-dollar telescopes with mirrors 30 meters across, the 1.4-meter instrument being installed this month atop South Baldy Mountain in New Mexico may seem like a bit player. But over the next few years, nine more identical telescopes will join it on the grassy, 3200-meter summit, forming a Y-shaped array that will surpass any other optical telescope in its eye for detail. When it's complete around 2025, the $200 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) will have the equivalent resolution of a gigantic telescope 347 meters across.
MROI's small telescopes can't match the light-gathering power of its giant cousins, so it will be limited to bright targets. But by combining light from the spread-out telescopes, it is expected to make out small structures on stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and peer at supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. It will even be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers above Earth, enabling it to spy on spy satellites.
That's one reason why the U.S. Air Force, which wants to monitor its own orbital assets and presumably those of others, is funding MROI. "They want to know: Did the boom break or did some part of the photovoltaic panels collapse?" says Michelle Creech-Eakman, an astronomer at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and project scientist on MROI. But if the facility succeeds, its biggest impact could be on the field of astronomy, by drawing new attention to the promise of optical interferometry, a powerful but challenging strategy for extracting exquisitely sharp images from relatively small, cheap telescopes.
Wikipedia article on Astronomical Optical Interferometry.
Related: Very Large Telescope's MUSE Instrument Studies the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
Very Large Telescope's ESPRESSO Combines Light From All Four Unit Telescopes for the First Time
Very Large Telescope Captures First Direct Image of a Planet Being Formed
Related Stories
The Very Large Telescope's (VLT) Multi-unit spectroscopic explorer (MUSE) has been used to study the galaxies in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. It has also revealed previously unseen galaxies:
Sometimes, astronomy is about surveying widely to get the big picture. And sometimes it's about looking more and more deeply. First released in 2004, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is clearly about going deep. It's a composite image of a tiny region of space, located in the direction of the southern constellation Fornax, made from Hubble Space Telescope data gathered over several months. There are an estimated 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which exist as far back in time as 13 billion years ago (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang). Being able to see galaxies so near the beginning of our universe has been a fantastic tool for understanding how the universe has evolved. And now – thanks to an instrument called MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer), astronomers have been able to eke out yet more information – a veritable bonanza of information – from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Their work is being published today (November 29, 2017) in a series of 10 papers in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Also at ESO.
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - I. Survey description, data reduction, and source detection (open, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201730833) (DX)
The rest of the papers are paywalled:
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - II. Spectroscopic redshifts and comparisons to color selections of high-redshift galaxies (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201731195) (DX)The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - III. Testing photometric redshifts to 30th magnitude (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201731351) (DX)
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - IV. Global properties of C III] emitters (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201730985) (DX)
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - V. Spatially resolved stellar kinematics of galaxies at redshift 0.2 ≲ z ≲ 0.8 (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201730905) (DX)
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - VI. The faint-end of the Lyα luminosity function at 2.91 (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201731431) (DX)
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - VII. Fe ii* emission in star-forming galaxies (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201731499) (DX)
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - VIII. Extended Lyman-α haloes around high-z star-forming galaxies (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201731480) (DX)
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - IX. Evolution of galaxy merger fraction since z ≈ 6 (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201731586) (DX)
The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey - X. Lyα equivalent widths at 2.9 (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201731579) (DX)
ESO's Very Large Telescope has combined the light from all four of its Unit Telescopes into its ESPRESSO instrument for the first time, effectively creating a 16 meter aperture optical telescope:
The ESPRESSO instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile has for the first time been used to combine light from all four of the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes. Combining light from the Unit Telescopes in this way makes the VLT the largest optical telescope in existence in terms of collecting area.
One of the original design goals of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) was for its four Unit Telescopes (UTs) to work together to create a single giant telescope. With the first light of the ESPRESSO spectrograph using the four-Unit-Telescope mode of the VLT, this milestone has now been reached.
After extensive preparations by the ESPRESSO consortium (led by the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Geneva, with the participation of research centres from Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland) and ESO staff, ESO's Director General Xavier Barcons initiated this historic astronomical observation with the push of a button in the control room.
[...] Light from the four Unit Telescopes is routinely brought together in the VLT Interferometer for the study of extremely fine detail in comparatively bright objects. But interferometry, which combines the beams "coherently", cannot exploit the huge light-gathering potential of the combined telescopes to study faint objects.
Previously: First Light for VLT's ESPRESSO Exoplanet Hunter
It's Official: Astronomers Caught The First-Ever Direct Picture of a Planet Being Born
For the very first time, astronomers have captured an image of a baby planet as it carves a path through the disc of dust that surrounds its star, an orange dwarf 113.4 parsecs (370 light-years) away from Earth.
[...] PDS 70 has a few features that made it a good candidate for this sort of search. Its protoplanetary disc is large, spanning a radius of around 130 astronomical units (the distance between Earth and the Sun; the Kuiper belt only goes up to about 50 au).
[...] Using its coronagraph and polarisation filters, the [Very Large Telescope] team discovered a very large planet orbiting in the gap in PDS 70's protoplanetary disc - which means it's probably still in the process of accumulating material. Further analysis of the planet, described in a second paper, was conducted based on its spectrum. Its mass is several times that of Jupiter, and its orbit is around 22 AU, just a little bit farther than Uranus's orbit around the Sun. It takes about 120 Earth years to complete one orbit around its star, and its surface temperature is around 1,200 Kelvin.
PDS 70. Also at ESO and Syfy Wire.
Discovery of a planetary-mass companion within the gap of the transition disk around PDS 70
Orbital and atmospheric characterization of the planet within the gap of the PDS 70 transition disk
Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
If Lowell Observatory's Gerard van Belle gets his way, you'll soon be watching an exoplanet cross the face of its star, hundreds of light-years from the Earth. He can't show you that right now, but he should be able to when the new mirrors are installed at the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer in northern Arizona. They're arriving now and should soon start collecting starlight—and making it the highest-resolution optical telescope in the world.
Van Belle recently showed Ars around the gigantic instrument, which bears almost no resemblance to what a non-astronomer pictures when they hear the word "telescope." There are a couple of more traditional telescopes in dome-topped silos on site, including one built in 1920s in Ohio, where it spent the first few decades of its life.
The best way to improve imagery on these traditional scopes is to increase the diameter of the mirror catching light. But this has its limits—perfect mirrors can only be built so large.
[...] A bigger mirror provides two advantages: it catches more light (making fainter objects visible) and it produces a higher-resolution image. If you give up on the first advantage, you can go all in on the second by laying out a handful of small mirrors over a considerable distance. The total mirror area (and therefore light collection) won't be that great, but the tremendous diameter of the array cranks the resolution up to 11. That's the principle behind the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer, a Y-shaped installation with a functional diameter of up to 430 meters.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/meet-the-telescope-that-may-soon-show-you-an-exo-eclipse/
Related: Very Large Telescope Interferometer Captures Best Ever Image of Another Star (Antares)
Very Large Telescope's MUSE Instrument Studies the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
Very Large Telescope's ESPRESSO Combines Light From All Four Unit Telescopes for the First Time
High-Resolution View Into The Infrared Universe
Very Large Telescope Captures First Direct Image of a Planet Being Formed
Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer Will Have Resolution of a 347-Meter Telescope for $200m
The Swarm Telescope Concept
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday July 06 2018, @12:28AM (3 children)
1.4 meter is about 54 inches. Which is the size mirror your wife/gf uses to examine the zits on her face every morning.
/ I'm gonna pay for this
// here's hoping there is no linkage from this account to me
/// $wife, I apologize in advance
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Friday July 06 2018, @02:38AM
Compare to:
Extremely Large Telescope (39.3 meters)
Thirty Meter Telescope (30 meters)
Giant Magellan Telescope (24.5 meters)
Very Large Telescope (8.2 meters × 4 + 1.8 meters × 4)
James Webb Space Telescope (6.5 meters)
Hubble Space Telescope (2.4 meters)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 06 2018, @04:53AM
Most video that I watch from England and Canada also use inches and miles. A very popular one is AVE (he's from Canadia).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 06 2018, @08:45PM
Your wife uses a 4 and a half foot mirror to look at the zits on her face???
I hesitate to ask what size mirror she uses as a full-length mirror!
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Friday July 06 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
Wouldn't change anybody's minds since they were already made up a prior.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 07 2018, @12:02AM
They photoshopped the telescope in real time! Faaake!
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