Universe’s secrets captured on camera
5 Aug 2010 by Evoluted New Media
The night sky is to be photographed by a 1400 megapixel camera as part of a new project to monitor 75% of the sky for supernova and near-earth asteroids.
The night sky is to be photographed by a 1400 megapixel camera as part of a new project to monitor 75% of the sky for supernova and near-earth asteroids.
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The Pan-STARRS sky survey telescope in Hawaii |
Scientists also hope the Pan-STARRS sky survey telescope (PS1) will provide clues to the nature of dark energy and dark matter, and will validate Einstein’s theory of general relativity (which predicts that light can bend around an object in space because it is pulled towards the object by gravity).
PS1 – which took almost a decade to develop – will gather detailed images of almost three-quarters of the night sky from its base atop the dormant volcano Haleakala in Hawaii. “The huge camera lets us map about one-sixth of the sky every month, in five different colours,” said Professor Stephen Smartt from Queen’s University Belfast and chair of the Pan-STARRS Science Council. “We compare every image with one taken previously and try to track everything that either moves or flashes.”
PS1 will make repeated observations of the sky at least 30 times a night – areas of specific interest will be observed several hundred times. Powerful computers will process the data which will reach petabytes levels. The analysis uses custom-made software that enables astronomers to automate the first steps in classification of the astronomical objects observed, providing automatic measurements of key properties such as the temperature and metallicity of stars, or the redshift of distant objects.
The 1.8m telescope – which has a 3.2 degree diameter field of view – is operated remotely from the Advanced Technology Research Centre in Paukalani, Maui. Plans are to build four Pan-STARRS to quadruple the light gathering capability of PS1.
Professor Carlos Frenk of the University of Durham said: “PS1 will generate the largest ever multi-colour survey of the cosmos. Alongside computer simulations of the universe, these data will help us understand the life cycles of galaxies and, if we are lucky, the nature of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that control the evolution of our cosmos.”
Pan-STARRS –Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System – will also scan the night sky for extra-solar planets, failed stars and distant active galaxies. Scientists also hope it may catch a distant galaxy’s central black hole in the act of swallowing a star – an event which would lead to an increase in brightness that lasts for a few days.
“Whenever astronomers have tried a new way of looking at the sky, they’ve been in for surprises,” said Professor Han-Walter Rix from the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy, “Pan-STARRS1 is the first systematic, large-scale survey of time-dependent phenomena in the night sky. If history is any guide, we are bound to find something completely new.”
Also involved in the project are the Universities of Edinburgh and Hawaii, and the Max Planck Institutes of Astronomy and Extra Terrestrial Physics and John Hopkins University; it is funded by the US Air Force.
