a telescope to spot signs of alien life
Last Updated : GMT 06:49:16
Arab Today, arab today
Arab Today, arab today
Last Updated : GMT 06:49:16
Arab Today, arab today

A telescope to spot signs of alien life

Arab Today, arab today

Arab Today, arab today A telescope to spot signs of alien life

Cerro Armazones is a crumbling dome of rock that dominates the parched peaks of the Chilean Coast Range
Kuwait City - Arab Today

Cerro Armazones is a crumbling dome of rock that dominates the parched peaks of the Chilean Coast Range north of Santiago.

A couple of old concrete platforms and some rusty pipes, parts of the mountain’s old weather station, are the only hints that humans have ever taken an interest in this forbidding, arid place. Even the views look alien, with the surrounding boulder-strewn desert bearing a remarkable resemblance to the landscape of Mars.

Dramatic change is coming to Cerro Armazones, however — for in a few weeks, the 10,000-foot mountain is going to have its top knocked off.

“We are going to blast it with dynamite and then carry off the rubble,” engineer Gird Hudepohl says. “We will take about 80 feet off the top of the mountain to create a plateau — and when we have done that, we will build the world’s biggest telescope there.”

Given the peak’s remote, inhospitable location that might sound an improbable claim — except for the fact that Hudepohl has done this sort of thing before. He is one of the European Southern Observatory’s most experienced engineers and was involved in the decapitation of another nearby mountain, Cerro Paranal, on which his team then erected one of the planet’s most sophisticated observatories.

The Paranal complex has been in operation for more than a decade and includes four giant instruments with 8-metre-wide mirrors — known as the Very Large Telescopes or VLTs — as well as control rooms and a labyrinth of underground tunnels linking its instruments.

More than 100 astronomers, engineers and support staff work and live there. A few dozen metres below the telescopes, they have a sports complex with a squash court, an indoor football pitch, and a luxurious 110-room residence that has a central swimming pool and a restaurant serving meals and drinks around the clock. Built overlooking one of the world’s driest deserts, the place is an amazing oasis. (See box.)

Now the European Southern Observatory, of which Britain is a key member state, wants Hudepohl and his team to repeat this remarkable trick and take the top off Cerro Armazones, which is 20 kilometres distant.

Though this time they will construct an instrument so huge it will dwarf all the telescopes on Paranal put together, and any other telescope on the planet. When completed, the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and its 39-metre mirror will allow astronomers to peer farther into space and look farther back into the history of the Universe than any other astronomical device in existence. Its construction will push telescope-making to its limit, however. Its primary mirror will be made of almost 800 segments — each 1.4 metres in diameter but only a few centimetres thick — which will have to be aligned with microscopic precision.

It is a remarkable juxtaposition: amid utter desolation, scientists have built giant machines engineered to operate with smooth perfection and are now planning to top this achievement by building an even more vast device. The question is: for what purpose? Why go to a remote wilderness in northern Chile and chop down peaks to make homes for some of the planet’s most complex scientific hardware?

The answer is straightforward, says Cambridge University astronomer Professor Gerry Gilmore. It is all about water.

“The atmosphere here is as dry as you can get and that is critically important. Water molecules obscure the view from telescopes on the ground. It is like trying to peer through mist — for mist is essentially a suspension of water molecules in the air, after all, and they obscure your vision. For a telescope based at sea level that is a major drawback.

“However, if you build your telescope where the atmosphere above you is completely dry, you will get the best possible views of the stars — and there is nowhere on Earth that has air drier than this place. For good measure, the high-altitude winds blow in a smooth, laminar manner above Paranal — like slabs of glass — so images of stars remain remarkably steady as well.”

The view of the sky here is close to perfect, in other words — as an evening stroll around the viewing platform on Paranal demonstrates vividly.

During my visit, the Milky Way hung over the observatory like a single white sheet. I could see the four main stars of the Southern Cross; Alpha Centauri, whose unseen companion Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our solar system; the two Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way; and the Coalsack, an interstellar dust cloud that forms a striking silhouette against the starry Milky Way. None are visible in northern skies and none appear with such brilliance anywhere else on the planet.

Hence the decision to build this extraordinary complex of VLTs. At sunset, each one’s housing is opened and the four great telescopes are brought slowly into operation. Each machine is made to rotate and swivel, like football players stretching muscles before a match. Each housing is the size of a block of flats. Yet they move in complete silence, so precise is their engineering.

Building the four VLTs, which have been named Antu (Sun), Kueyen (Moon), Melipal (Southern Cross) and Yepun (Venus) in the language of Mapuche people of Chile, was a formidable challenge, needless to say.

Each has a giant mirror that is 8.2 metres in diameter but only 17 centimetres thick: any thicker, and the mirror would be too heavy to move and point. Such thinness leaves the mirrors liable to deform as temperatures and air pressure fluctuate, however, and so each has 150 actuators fitted to its unpolished side.

These push the mirrors to keep them within a few billionths of a centimetre of their proper shape. In addition, ESO astronomers use a laser-based system known as adaptive optics to measure turbulence in the upper atmosphere and to change each telescope’s internal mirror configuration to compensate for any disturbance they can measure.

The result is a cluster of astronomical devices of incredible power and flexibility, one that has been involved in an astonishing number of critically important discoveries and observations over the past decade, as ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut explains.

“Perhaps the VLT’s most spectacular achievement was its tracking of stars at the centre of the Milky Way. Astronomers followed them as they revolved around nothing. Eventually they were able to show that something incredibly small and dark and massive lay at the centre of this interstellar waltz. This was the first time, we now know, that scientists had directly observed the effect of the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of our galaxy.”

The VLTs also played a key role in providing observations which showed, from the behaviour of distant supernovae, that the expansion of the Universe was actually accelerating thanks to the action of a force now known as dark energy.

This discovery later won Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess the 2011 Nobel prize for physics. And in 2004 the telescopes were used to make a direct observation of an exoplanet — a planet that orbits around a star other than our Sun.

It was another astronomical first. Until then scientists had only been able to infer the existence of exoplanets from the way they affected the movement of their parent star or its light output. “This was history-book material, a discovery of the same quality as Galileo’s drawings of the mountains on the moon or the satellites of Jupiter,” Hainaut says.

These discoveries have only whetted astronomers’ appetites for more. Hence the decision to build the £800 million (Dh4,957 million) E-ELT — whose British funding will come through a £88 million investment from the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council. Engineers have now completed a road to the mountain from Paranal and on June 16 are set to begin blasting to remove the top from Cerro Armazones.

Then they will start to build the E-ELT using 798 hexagonal pieces of mirror to create a mammoth device that will be able to collect a hundred million times more light than the human eye. When completed in around 2025, the 2,700-tonne telescope will be housed in a 74-metre-high dome and operated by astronomers working 20 kilometres away in Paranal. It will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky.

Simone Zaggia, of the Inaf Observatory of Padua, is another frequent visitor to Paranal and has a very different reason for backing the E-ELT. He believes it will play a vital role in the hunt for exoplanets — in particular, exoplanets that are Earth-like and which could support life. “At present, our biggest telescopes can only spot really big exoplanets, giants that are as big as Jupiter and Saturn,” he says.

“But we really want to know about the smaller worlds that make up the solar systems in our galaxy. In other words, we want to find out if there are many Earth-like planets in our part of the Universe. More importantly we want to find out if their atmospheres contain levels of oxygen or carbon dioxide or methane or other substances that suggest there is life there. To do that, we need a giant telescope like the E-ELT.”

This point is backed by Gilmore. “We can see exoplanets but we cannot study them in detail because — from our distant perspective — they appear so close to their parent stars. However, the magnification which the E-ELT will provide will mean we will be able to look at them directly and clearly. In 15 years, we should have a picture of a planet around another star and that picture could show its surface changing colour just as Earth does as the seasons change — indicating that vegetation exists on that world. We will then have found alien life.”

Source: KUNA

arabstoday
arabstoday

Name *

E-mail *

Comment Title*

Comment *

: Characters Left

Mandatory *

Terms of use

Publishing Terms: Not to offend the author, or to persons or sanctities or attacking religions or divine self. And stay away from sectarian and racial incitement and insults.

I agree with the Terms of Use

Security Code*

a telescope to spot signs of alien life a telescope to spot signs of alien life

 



Name *

E-mail *

Comment Title*

Comment *

: Characters Left

Mandatory *

Terms of use

Publishing Terms: Not to offend the author, or to persons or sanctities or attacking religions or divine self. And stay away from sectarian and racial incitement and insults.

I agree with the Terms of Use

Security Code*

a telescope to spot signs of alien life a telescope to spot signs of alien life

 



GMT 10:06 2012 Saturday ,28 July

Querrey advances at ATP LA Open

GMT 21:15 2017 Thursday ,01 June

Trump condemns deadly Kabul explosion

GMT 02:15 2017 Thursday ,24 August

Is your country on the Qatar free entry list of 80?

GMT 19:48 2016 Monday ,03 October

Controversial boxing champ Tyson Fury retires

GMT 08:20 2015 Tuesday ,08 December

PC market woes show no sign of easing

GMT 17:27 2017 Tuesday ,25 April

20 Yemeni soldiers killed, injured in explosion

GMT 11:52 2017 Saturday ,30 December

OIC condemns Mar Mina Church attack

GMT 00:03 2017 Saturday ,25 March

Arab Meeting to Examine Anti-Corruption Methods

GMT 13:12 2017 Thursday ,20 April

Deputy premier meets Arab League chief

GMT 14:13 2014 Friday ,10 January

Opel Astra GTC

GMT 18:27 2016 Tuesday ,02 August

Turkish Foreign Minister arrives in Islamabad

GMT 11:27 2016 Tuesday ,13 December

Saudi woman arrested for challenging social norms

GMT 19:56 2017 Thursday ,09 March

Qatar Pavilion Opens at ITB Berlin

GMT 23:34 2013 Thursday ,07 February

New BMW 3 Series Gran Turismo

GMT 12:57 2017 Friday ,13 October

JPMorgan open to digital money if regulated

GMT 04:38 2017 Friday ,10 March

ADNOC opens fifth ADNOC Xpress

GMT 10:30 2017 Friday ,10 November

BDF military contingent honoured

GMT 17:37 2017 Tuesday ,24 January

China jails former Sinopec president for graft

GMT 19:34 2017 Sunday ,14 May

Austria centre-right calls for snap elections

GMT 14:54 2014 Saturday ,29 November

Wall cladding, wallpaper, fabric and wood!
Arab Today, arab today
 
 Arab Today Facebook,arab today facebook  Arab Today Twitter,arab today twitter Arab Today Rss,arab today rss  Arab Today Youtube,arab today youtube  Arab Today Youtube,arab today youtube

Maintained and developed by Arabs Today Group SAL.
All rights reserved to Arab Today Media Group 2021 ©

Maintained and developed by Arabs Today Group SAL.
All rights reserved to Arab Today Media Group 2021 ©

arabstoday arabstoday arabstoday arabstoday
arabstoday arabstoday arabstoday
arabstoday
بناية النخيل - رأس النبع _ خلف السفارة الفرنسية _بيروت - لبنان
arabstoday, Arabstoday, Arabstoday