Ancient astronomers noticed dark sky looked like stars marched by overhead as the accuracy of the dancers. At the beginning of the 17th century, Galileo Galilei brought the world one step closer to the heavens with a telescope, the discovery of celestial wonders, among others, the moons around Jupiter, and moon surface, our members.
Today, the stars are closer to us than ever before, thanks to powerful telescopes in space, on the ground. Modern astronomers have to walk outside, because they get accurate data submitted directly to their own laptops. If Galileo could see us now, he seems to be thrilled by the developments – some tone puzzled even the astronomy means through telescopes on the sky, twinkling dark.
"You have access to a wealth of invaluable data in astronomy from the couch," said Amy Mainzer, Deputy project scientist for infrared survey Explorer, a wide-field of a NASA laboratory in NASA's Pasadena, California, a good Jet in Calif. "we can do almost all of our research on laptops."
Sometimes, the astronomers to travel to the land-based. They sleep during the day, and, instead of at the night sky, are the telescopes of all computer screens. Some telescopes can be operated even remote laptop computers. Mainzer, a colleague, Mike Cushing, a member of the smart team in JPL, recently spent a night with the stars in a conference room in NASA's infrared processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of technology Pasadena, California.
"I suppose in a sense, be vulnerable to easy romance makes remote observation," said Cushing. "But it is more complex for using your own ability to sleep in the bed!"
This particular night, Mainzer Cushing, along with the undergraduate student, Emily DeBaun mkolg Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H., were bamrdf brown dwarfs. These are cool, Dim stars with little has stunted development. They begin life as stars, but never grow massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion and shines with the light of the Sun, like our Sun does so brilliantly. Instead, brown dwarfs because of the heat leftover from glowing shape. This heat makes it easy to see with infrared telescopes.
The first brown dwarf discovered until 1995, but was already predicted those objects no longer exist in the 1960s. Additional discoveries during the 2000s rolled in early with the help of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data, the two microns all-sky survey, a project to map all-sky infrared by analyzing infrared processing center and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Navon task ensures that find even more of these small stars, with all sky infrared enhanced. In fact, the smart is probably more than double the number of known brown dwarfs come out to our 25 years of sunlight, and even one may find it more close to us than our rack known star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4 light years away. Wise telescope Benno in all-sky survey and entered his bedroom in 2011 a month, but astronomers now begins the daunting data.
Mainzer and Cushing was picked some good brown dwarf candidates out of the smart data. Their next step was to use the facility telescope NASA infrared above Mauna Kea in Hawaii to gather more information about the objects, and to understand if they are really brown dwarfs, and not something else, such as a distant galaxy masquerading as cool nearby star. This is what brought them to a quiet Conference Room late at night, when even the most astronomers usually owlish of working in the building went home.
"You've got the Guidedog," said Cushing, speaking through the phone speaker operator telescope NASA infrared telescope facility in Hawaii. Guidedog is the name of the computer that controls the camera the telescope. The operator took the computer to focus the telescope.
During the night, the Mainzer vkoshing said the operator, when they were ready to point the telescope at different patch of sky, while controlling the settings that are specific to the interface software on their laptops. The screen of the laptop was projected onto the big screen in the room, where they can get a better view of the software.
One task involved objects and their interest into windows, or slots, the mask stars in other nearby. After the command was given to capture the image, musical instruments, infrared telescope facility, called the spectrometer, broke apart or the fundamental components of the object, like a Prism disperses sunlight into a rainbow. These data were then plots, spectra, showing the proportions of different light than the strength of each wave. Peaks, the purchase was discovered molecules that make up the object, as well as its temperature.
"I think we decline T dwarf," said Mainzer, referring to the sort of brown dwarfs the organizing system according to their temperature. T-dwarfs are about 1400 to 500 Kelvin (about 960 to 230 degrees. c). Wise to find cold heat, maybe even dwarfs even the elusive Y-dwarfs, which some theories say might be cold in about 200 Kelvin (minus 73 degrees Celsius). If this object was discovered, it would be a star-like body is cold.
The search for brown dwarfs continued into the night. The astronomers ar were bags of sweet-and-sour gummies and M & Ms, not to mention the thrill of discovering new worlds.
They stayed until 3 a.m. on the same night, midnight in Hawaii. The telescope was then in turn another team of observers.
"We are still late with the stars, even though we see them using electronic sensors instead of looking through a telescope within our eyes," said Mainzer. "But compared to the ancient astronomers, I think our feeling of AWE is the same, we are continuing search to understand our amazing universe."
The source of the story:
The above story is published materials provided by good laboratory of NASA/Jet.
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