All posts tagged: telescope

Highly sensitive radio telescope array to be built in Nevada desert

Highly sensitive radio telescope array to be built in Nevada desert

Published by Sam Flores

Nestled in the Great Basin, a remote stretch of the Nevada desert is set to become home to the world’s most sensitive radio telescope array. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content. The California Institute of Technology, which is leading the project, announced last week that it is moving ahead with the telescope’s construction after securing enough funding. Known as the Deep Synoptic Array, the project calls for 1,650 individual radio dishes that together will study supermassive black holes, spinning dead stars known as pulsars and fast radio bursts, which are brief, intense explosions of radio waves that often originate from deep space. “It’s the sheer number of antennas that makes this completely unique and unlike other existing telescopes,” said Gregg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech and a principal investigator for the Deep Synoptic Array. Radio telescopes detect naturally occurring radio waves emitted by stars, planets, galaxies and other celestial objects. Astronomers can analyze the unique patterns of radio emissions from these sources to understand …

Put your name aboard NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Put your name aboard NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. If you missed the chance to get your name in space during Artemis II’s historic mission in April, you don’t have to wait until Artemis III in 2027 for another opportunity. Today, NASA opened up submissions to have your name put aboard the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.  Currently scheduled to launch on August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA’s next space observatory. According to NASA, it will pair a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to scan vast, deep swaths of sky. Roman’s field of view is at least 100 times larger than the still-chugging Hubble Space Telescope and could measure light from one billion galaxies. The observatory will also be able to block starlight, allowing it …

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Is Ready to Start Its Cosmic Survey

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Is Ready to Start Its Cosmic Survey

Published by skeptic

After nearly a decade in development, NASA’s next big telescope is almost ready to travel into space. The agency has set Aug. 30 as the launch date for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This places the project approximately eight months ahead of its original schedule and, according to NASA leadership, significantly under budget. “With less than three months to go, the Roman team now is finishing up tasks,” NASA said in a blog post. “Engineers are currently packing Roman up for a voyage from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, down to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida later this month.” Once at the launch site, the telescope will undergo a detailed inspection to verify that it sustained no damage during transit. Engineers will then fuel it with roughly 290 gallons of hydrazine and conduct several dress rehearsals before launching it into space. The destination for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, located about 1 million miles from Earth on the far side of the …

Compact X-ray telescope could deliver the first full chemical map of the Moon

Compact X-ray telescope could deliver the first full chemical map of the Moon

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Moon’s surface has been sampled, scanned, and photographed for decades, yet one of the most basic questions about it remains unsettled: what, exactly, is the whole thing made of from place to place? That gap matters because the Moon’s chemistry is one of the clearest records of how it formed, cooled, and changed over time. It also matters for a more immediate reason. The lunar south pole, now a major focus for exploration planning, cannot be understood fully without a better picture of its elemental makeup. A team from Tokyo Metropolitan University says a compact X-ray telescope may finally make that possible. Using numerical simulations, the researchers found that a lightweight instrument orbiting the Moon could produce the first complete map of elemental abundance across the entire lunar surface, something past missions have not been able to achieve. Their results suggest that one telescope could map five key elements across the Moon in about two years. A larger system using 25 telescopes could do the job faster and at finer detail. X-ray Fluorescence Imaging …

The telescope that could reveal the missing half of the universe

The telescope that could reveal the missing half of the universe

Published by skeptic

A new European-led telescope could map the dusty, hidden half of the universe, all without using fossil fuels. If you have ever seen the Milky Way in the night sky, you probably noticed that it looks cloudy. That is because towards the centre of our galaxy, and of most galaxies, there are vast amounts of dust that make it hard to see what is going on. That means a big swathe of the universe is hidden to us, with about half of the light coming from galaxies buried in this dust. The best way to see inside these obscured regions is to use a gigantic submillimetre-wave telescope that detects radiation between radio waves and infrared. “Without submillimetre, we’re getting a very biased picture of what’s out there,” said Claudia Cicone, an astrophysicist at the University of Oslo in Norway. “We are missing the regions of space that are most obscured by dust.” In recent decades, telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have allowed us to probe some of these regions. Now astronomers want …

DAMPE telescope reshapes understanding of cosmic rays

DAMPE telescope reshapes understanding of cosmic rays

Published by skeptic

A multinational team of scientists working with the Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) space telescope has uncovered a consistent pattern in cosmic rays, offering new insight into their origin and behaviour. The research, involving experts from the University of Geneva, identifies a shared feature across multiple types of high-energy particles. The findings have been peer-reviewed and published in Nature. The study focuses on cosmic rays, which are highly energetic particles that travel through space and occasionally strike Earth. Despite being discovered over a century ago, their precise origins remain unresolved. By analysing detailed measurements from the DAMPE satellite, researchers have now observed a phenomenon known as “spectral softening” occurring consistently across different particle types. The result is significant: it strongly supports theories that the acceleration and movement of cosmic rays depend on a property called rigidity, rather than energy per particle. This narrows the field of viable explanations and marks a meaningful step toward understanding how these particles are generated and propagate through the galaxy. What are cosmic rays? Cosmic rays are among the most …

10,000 new planets found hidden in NASA telescope data

10,000 new planets found hidden in NASA telescope data

Published by skeptic

An artist’s impression of a star with two planets transiting across it NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI) Astronomers have identified more than 10,000 candidate planets in data from a NASA telescope, the most ever found in a single haul. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched in 2018. It is tasked with looking at stars across the sky for planets in orbit, known as exoplanets. It identifies these exoplanets by looking for brief dips in the brightness of the light reaching Earth from each star – a sign that an exoplanet orbiting the star has passed in front of it. So far, the telescope has found more than 750 confirmed exoplanets, but it has thousands more candidates awaiting confirmation. There are other telescopes that have found exoplanets, and the total number of exoplanets confirmed by all telescopes now stands at more than 6000. Joshua Roth at Princeton University and his colleagues have now announced a much bigger number of possible planets by re-analysing the first year of TESS data. By combining images taken …

PoET telescope makes first observations in exoplanet research

PoET telescope makes first observations in exoplanet research

Published by skeptic

The Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET) will collect sunlight and redirect it to ESO’s ESPRESSO instrument, which will obtain highly detailed spectra of both the entire Sun and specific regions such as sunspots. These observations will be key to understanding the ‘noise’ that similar features in other stars introduce in observations aimed at detecting exoplanets around them. PoET, installed at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal site in Chile, has made its first observations. The telescope will work with ESO’s ESPRESSO instrument to study the Sun in detail. Described as a solar telescope for planet hunters, PoET aims to understand how the variation in the light from stars like the Sun can mask the presence of planets orbiting them, helping us in our search for worlds outside the Solar System. PoET’s main telescope, seen above being lowered into its dome, has a 60-cm mirror. PoET also has a second smaller telescope that collects light from the entire disc of the Sun. “One of the greatest challenges for the detection of other Earths orbiting other Suns …