The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), scheduled to be completed by 2024, will have a resolution 10 times that of the Hubble spacecraft. Experts say it will be able to observe black holes in the distant cosmos and make out planets in other solar systems with unprecedented detail. Such technology, astronomers say, will help humans determine how the universe formed and if planets hundreds of light years away could support life. "With this science, there are no limits to the possibilities that are open," said Bachelet, standing on the GMT's site, a wind-buffeted, 8,250-foot (2,500-meter) mountaintop. "What it does is open the door to understanding," she said. The GMT - a collaboration of institutions in the United States, Chile, South Korea, Brazil, and Australia - will rely on seven intricately curved lenses, each almost 28 feet (8.5 meters) wide.
Artist's illustration of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will be built atop Las Campanas Peak in Chile. The groundbreaking ceremony for GMT, which will feature seven mirrors arranged to form a light-collecting surface 80 feet
For the system to work, no one lens can have a blemish of more than 25 nanometers, which is some four thousand times smaller than the average width of a human hair. "Astronomy is like archaeology; what we see in the sky happened many years ago," said Yuri Beletsky, a Belarussian astronomer for the GMT. "The biggest expectation is that we find something that we don't expect," he added on a bus driving up sinuous switchbacks to the planned observatory. Two other massive instruments - the European Extremely Large Telescope, also in Chile, and the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii - are scheduled to be completed in the 2020s as well. But GMT President Patrick McCarthy says the telescope's massive single lenses and wider observation field will allow for more precise measurements.
Among the phenomena he hopes to observe is dark matter, mysterious invisible material that makes up most of the universe's mass. Astronomers say Chile's bone-dry Atacama Desert, host to the GMT and dozens of other high-powered telescopes, is uniquely suited to space observation as it has dry air, high mountains, and little light pollution. McCarthy also points out that another advantage for astronomers in Chile is that the airflow from the nearby Pacific Ocean is smoother than that over continental deserts, meaning scientists have to contend with less atmospheric interference.
Hoping to find life on other planets, astronomers start on giant Chile telescope
A newly discovered pulsar, called PSR J0540-6919, is the first gamma-ray pulsar to be found outside the Milky Way galaxy. The pulsar, which was imaged by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is also the most luminous gamma-ray pulsar astronomers have ever seen. The newly discovered pulsar is 163,000 light-years away from our solar system, located on the outer edge of the Tarantula Nebula, an oft-studied region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
The newly discovered gamma-ray pulsar, J0540, is one of two pulsars identified within the Tarantula Nebula. The other is PSR J0537−6910.
The Tarantula Nebula is so frequently studied because it's one of the closest and most active star-forming regions. In fact, scientists have known about this impressive source of gamma rays for some time. But until now, astronomers had misunderstood the source. Scientists thought the gamma rays were the result of subatomic particles colliding in the wake of violent supernova explosions. The bursts are not a cumulative effect, it turns out. They are generated by a singular source.
"It's now clear that a single pulsar, PSR J0540-6919, is responsible for roughly half of the gamma-ray brightness we originally thought came from the nebula," lead scientist Pierrick Martin, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, said in a press release. "That is a genuine surprise." Researchers announced the newly discovered gamma-ray pulsar in a paper published in the journal Science.
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Scientists at the University of Warwick in England have built the first weather map of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet hosts winds measuring upwards of 5,400 miles per hour. "Whilst we have previously known of wind on exoplanets, we have never before been able to directly measure and map a weather system," Tom Louden, Warwick astrophysicist and lead researcher on the project, said in a press release. The exoplanet is HD 189733b, a hot Jupiter-like world that lies 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula, the Fox.
The day side of the exoplanet likely looks blue, as light becomes scattered from the atmosphere's silicate haze. The planet's high temperature causes the night side to glow a deep red.
The combination of spectroscopy and the scientists' understanding of the Doppler Effect made it possible to measure the velocity of winds in the faraway planet's atmosphere. Using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, a telescope in La Silla, Chile, researchers were able to detail the exoplanet's atmosphere by plotting sodium atoms' absorption of the host star's radiation -- that's the spectroscopy part.
By analyzing the way these spectroscopy results changed as the planet moved across the face of its sun -- its atmosphere moving away from Earth and towards Earth -- researchers were able to pick up the signatures of the Doppler Effect and ascertain the atmosphere's velocity on both sides of the planet. "As parts of HD 189733b's atmosphere move towards or away from the Earth the Doppler effect changes the wavelength of this feature, which allows the velocity to be measured," Louden explained. "The surface of the star is brighter at the center than it is at the edge, so as the planet moves in front of the star the relative amount of light blocked by different parts of the atmosphere changes. For the first time, we've used this information to measure the velocities on opposite sides of the planet independently, which gives us our velocity map."
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Good troll
For the first time, scientists have tracked the source of a "fast radio burst" - a fleeting explosion of radio waves which, in this case, came from a galaxy six billion light-years away. The cause of the big flash, only the seventeenth ever detected, remains a puzzle, but spotting a host galaxy is a key moment in the study of such bursts. It also allowed the team to measure how much matter got in the way of the waves and thus to "weigh the Universe". Their findings are published in Nature.
Wake-up call
Fast radio bursts last only milliseconds but in that moment, whatever makes them blasts as much energy into space - in the form of radio waves - as our Sun emits in days or even weeks. To follow this particular signal home, an international team did rapid detective work with multiple telescopes and ultimately snapped an image of the source galaxy in visible light. Lead author Evan Keane had set up an alert system to trigger this flurry of activity, by running live data from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia directly into a supercomputer. "The goal was to reduce the lag from the thing hitting the dish, to us knowing that it hit the dish, from months - to nothing," he told the BBC.
Sure enough, when one of these mysterious bursts hit Parkes' famous 64m dish on April 18 2015, alarm bells rang and emails quickly circled the planet. By way of contrast, the first fast radio burst (FRB) ever detected struck the same dish in 2001 but was only reported in 2007. "A decade ago, we weren't really looking for them - and also our ability to handle the data and to search it in a reasonable time was significantly poorer," said Dr Keane, who now works for the Square Kilometre Array Organisation in Jodrell Bank, UK. "Whereas with this one, I was awoken by my phone going crazy a few seconds after it happened, saying: Evan, wake up! There was an FRB!"
Two hours later, the six 22m dishes of the Australian Telescope Compact Array, a 400km drive from Parkes, were already homing in on the culpable corner of the sky. They caught an afterglow of the flash, which took six days to fade. It was much fainter than the burst itself but allowed the team to zoom in on the source of the burst with 1,000 times more precision than ever before. Knowing exactly where to look, they next went hunting in optical light using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. "Right where the Compact Array tells us there should be something, there is a galaxy," Dr Keane said. Close examination of the Subaru data showed the galaxy to be elliptical - an off-spherical blob of stars that is well past its prime, in galactic terms.
Cosmic weigh-in
