Big Bang theory and matters astronomical

PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge have developed a new camera that produces much more detailed pictures of stars and nebulae than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and it does all this from here on Earth.

Until now, images from ground-based telescopes have been invariably blurred by Earth's atmosphere. Astronomers have developed a technique, known as adaptive optics (AO), to correct the blurring, but so far it has only worked successfully in the infrared, where the smearing is greatly reduced. However, a new noise-free, high-speed camera has been developed at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge that, when used behind the infrared Palomar Adaptive Optics System, at last makes very high resolution imaging possible in ordinary visible light.

The camera works by recording partially corrected adaptive optics images at high speed (20 frames per second or more). Software then checks each image to sort out which are the sharpest. Many are still significantly smeared by the atmosphere, but a small percentage of them are unaffected. These are combined to produce the final high-resolution image that astronomers want. The technique is called "Lucky Imaging" because it depends on the chance fluctuations in the atmosphere sorting themselves out and providing a set of images that is easier for the adaptive optics system to correct.

This work was carried out on the 200-inch (5.1 meter) Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain. Like all other ground-based telescopes, the images it normally produces are typically 10 times less detailed than those of the Hubble Space Telescope. Palomar's adaptive-optics system produces superb images in the infrared, but until now, its images in visible light have remained markedly poorer than Hubble images. With the new Lucky Camera, astronomers were able to obtain images that are twice as sharp as those produced by the Hubble Space Telescope-a remarkable achievement.

The images produced in the study are the sharpest direct images ever taken in visible light either from the ground or from space. "The system performed even better than we were expecting. It was fantastic to watch the first images come in and see that we were easily doing better than Hubble," says Nicholas Law, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and principal investigator for the instrument.

Most astronomical objects are so far away that astronomers are desperate to see more and more detail within them. The new pictures of the globular star cluster M13, located 25,000 light years away, are sharp enough that astronomers are able to find stars as little as one light-day apart. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year (almost 6 trillion miles). A light-day is the distance light travels in just one day. Stars in the vicinity of the solar system are much farther apart -the nearest star to our solar system is over four light-years away.

The astronomers also observed very fine detail in objects such as the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543). It is eight times closer to earth than M13, allowing filaments that are only a few light-hours across to be resolved.

The use of the camera at Palomar was a demonstration of the potential of visible-light adaptive optics and offers a glimpse of the detailed imagery to come. Astronomers at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are currently developing the first-ever astronomical adaptive-optics system fully capable of capturing visible-light images. The new system, known as PALM-3000, will routinely allow the 200-inch telescope at Palomar to outperform the Hubble Space Telescope at even blue wavelengths. Using state-of-the-art deformable mirrors, sensors, and a powerful laser, the upgraded Palomar adaptive-optics system will provide finer correction of the atmospheric blurring than any present adaptive optics system, allowing long-exposure images with the same fine detail as the "lucky" images taken recently.

Caltech's Richard Dekany, principal investigator for PALM-3000, says that the upgraded instrument could be available as early as 2010. "These Lucky Imaging results underscore the science potential of diffraction-limited visible-light observations on large ground-based telescopes," he explains.

To get even sharper pictures, astronomers will need to use bigger telescopes. The results open up the possibility of further improvements on even larger telescopes, such as the 10-meter Keck telescopes on the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii or in the future even larger telescopes, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

Working on the Lucky Imaging project were Law, Dekany, Mike Ireland, and Anna Moore from Caltech and the Palomar 200-inch crew. Other team members included Craig Mackay from Cambridge, James Lloyd from Cornell University, and Peter Tuthill, Henry Woodruff, and Gordon Robertson from the University of Sydney

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2020hindsight said:

Listened to "Starstuff " today on ABC Newsradio
two articles
a) https://www.aussiestockforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=201409&highlight=adams#post201409
b) new telescope software - Hubble sounds like it's suddenly been leapfrogged.

You can download podcasts - listen in / replay any time

INCLUDING ... (9/9/ 07)
http://www.abc.net.au/newsradio/audio/mp3/20070909starstuff.mp3

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Adams produced or co-produced other features including the critically-panned but hugely popular film adaptation of Barry Humphries' The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, directed by Bruce Beresford, which became the most successful Australian film ever made up to that time. Other films include "The Naked Bunyip", "Don's Party", "The Getting Of Wisdom", "Lonely Hearts", "We Of The Never Never", "Gendel Grendel Grendel", "Fighting Back" and "Hearts And Minds".

Other work
Adams chaired the Commission for the Future, established by the Hawke Government to build bridges between science and the community. In 1988 the Commission won a major United Nations award for educating Australia on the issue of greenhouse and climate change.

He chaired the National Australia Day Council. Its principal task was to choose the Australian of the Year. He also chairs the Advisory Board for the Centre of the Mind at the University of Sydney and the Australia National University in Canberra, and has been a board member of Greenpeace, CARE Australia, The National Museum of Australia, Adelaide's Festival of Ideas and Brisbane's Ideas at the Brisbane Powerhouse.

Adams is the author or editor of over 20 books, including The Unspeakable Adams, Adams Versus God, The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes, Retreat from Tolerance, Talkback and A Billion Voices, Adams Ark (published in 2004) and (with Lee Burton) "Emperors of the Air" (Allen & Unwin).

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wayneL said:

The cyclic universe theory

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cosmology-02c.html

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You can always ask "well then what happened before that?" The god hypothesis explains absolutely nothing; it gets us no closer to an answer. It's just a continuation of the same infinitely regressing line of questions

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The LHC will also help us to solve the mystery of antimatter. Matter and antimatter must have been produced in the same amounts at the time of the Big Bang. From what we have observed so far, our Universe is made of only matter. Why? The LHC could provide an answer.

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A supernova (plural: supernovae or supernovas) is a stellar explosion that creates an extremely luminous object. A supernova causes a burst of radiation that may briefly outshine its entire host galaxy before fading from view over several weeks or months. During this short interval, a supernova can radiate as much energy as the Sun would emit over 10 billion years.

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Here in the Milky Way, new stars are formed at a rate of roughly 4 per year; that's considered pretty normal for a spiral galaxy like ours. But researchers have found a galaxy that's absolutely bursting with new star formation. Instead of our leisurely 4 stars per year, this distant galaxy is generating more than 4,000 new stars a year

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A huge asteroid will zoom past Earth next week at such a close distance that amateur astronomers should be able to spot it, specialists said Wednesday.

Measuring between 150 and 600 metres across, asteroid 2007 TU24 would inflict devastating regional damage were it to hit Earth, but there is little risk of a collision, they said.

It will fly by on Tuesday, being around 534,000 km from the Earth at its closest point at 8:34am GMT (7:34pm Sydney time), according to a Near Earth Object (NEO) database compiled by the University of Pisa in Italy.

Close encounter

"For a brief time the asteroid will be observable in dark and clear skies with amateur telescopes of three inches (7.5 cm) or larger," NASA said on its NEO web site.

2007 TU24 will make the closest approach of any known potentially hazardous asteroid of this size or larger until 2027, NASA said, adding that objects of this size come close to Earth about every five years or so on average.

The rock was discovered only last October under a surveillance program run by the University of Arizona.

According to the Minor Planet Centre of the Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU), the closest detected approach by an asteroid was on 31 March 2004 by 2004 FU162, which came within 6,500 km of Earth.

The day after 2007 TU24's terrestrial flyby, asteroid 2007 WD5 is expected to come within 26,000 km of Mars, a distance that is less than a whisker in space terms.

Big splat

2007 WD5 ignited a brief surge of excitement among astronomers after it was discovered in November. Initial computations of its orbit gave a roughly 1-in-25 chance that it might whack into Mars on January 30, providing a celestial show that could be monitored by U.S. and European Mars probes.

Measuring about 50 metres across, it would have delivered an impact equivalent to a three-megatonne nuclear weapon. A rock of this size is thought to have exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, felling around 80 million trees over 2,200 km².

But further calculation showed that the hoped-for big splat would be a big miss.

"It's highly unlikely that it's going to hit," said NEO expert Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University in northwestern England, as the odds of a collision by 2007 WD5 fell to around 0.01 per cent, or one in 10,000.

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spooly74 said:

Earth to get a close shave with an asteroid tonight

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2020hindsight said:

sheesh -lol - under the table kids. .

tell you what spooly ...
if the bludy thing smashes through my window and breaks my Sidney Nolan, I'll be sorting it out with JC first thing I do up there. Then again, Sidney Nolan might be around to paint me a new one I guess. And Ned Kelly for a model for that matter.

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Measuring about 50 metres across, it would have delivered an impact equivalent to a three-megatonne nuclear weapon. A rock of this size is thought to have exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, felling around 80 million trees over 2,200 km².

....... the odds of a collision by 2007 WD5 fell to around 0.01 per cent, or one in 10,000.

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2020hindsight said:

Skint..
MGI Photosuite - got it with my first digital Sony camera

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2020hindsight said:

Scuba..
I went to starstuff - http://www.starstuff.com/ ? but not the article you mentioned .
any tips appreciated. Meanwhile , feel free to post a copy / link

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2020hindsight said:

Scuba..
I went to starstuff - http://www.starstuff.com/ ? but not the article you mentioned .
any tips appreciated. Meanwhile , feel free to post a copy / link

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jman said:

One thing I remember reading as a kid is the old black hole chestnut, what I never really understood was this;

If there are two spaceships, A and B, and spaceship A observes B disappearing into a black hole, apparently to the observers on spaceship A it will appear that spaceship B actually does enter the black hole and disappear.

However, to the unfortunate crew on spaceship B, time will be so distorted that they will be sitting around drumming their fingers waiting to enter the blackhole, but will never actually do so

So I guess it is all relevant to the observer, but are the crew aboard spaceship B actually still alive even though their companions aboard spaceship A saw them "disappear"? Or can the B crew members co-exist on two different "time planes"?

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