DEPARTMENT OF STRONOMYA AND ASTROPHSICS KAVLI INSTITUTE...

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DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR COSMOLOGICAL PHYSICS Telescope Complementarity: Optical is King 2015 Astro Immersion March 27 – 29, 2015 Tucson, Arizona

Transcript of DEPARTMENT OF STRONOMYA AND ASTROPHSICS KAVLI INSTITUTE...

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D e pa rt m e n t o f a s t ro n o m y

a n D a s t ro p h y s i c s

K av l i i n s t i t u t e f o r

c o s m o l o g i c a l p h y s i c s

Telescope Complementarity:Optical is King2015 Astro ImmersionMarch 27 – 29, 2015Tucson, Arizona

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Telescope Complementarity: Optical is KingContents

I. Itinerary

II. What is the Hubble Circle?

III. Speaker & Participant Profiles

IV. Reading Materials

A. Articles for Professor Wendy L. Freedman and Dean Edward “Rocky” Kolb: Giant Magellan Telescope Project

B. Articles for Professor Robert P. Kirshner: The Accelerating Universe

C. Articles for Professor Joshua Frieman: The Dark Energy Survey and the Mystery of Cosmic Acceleration

D. Articles for Assistant Professor Bradford Benson: South Pole Telescope: Using Light from the Big Bang to Backlight the Universe

E. Articles for Professor Daniel P. Marrone: The Event Horizon Telescope: A Detailed Look at Black Holes

F. Articles for Jeffery J. Puschell: Earth from Space: Weather Forecasting and Climate Monitoring

G. Articles for Professor Angela V. Olinto: Extreme Universe Space Observatory at the Japanese Module

V. Notes

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2015 Astro ImmersionItineraryI.

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 29 7

Astro Immersion 2015

Friday, March 27 | Arrival 6:00 pm Cocktail Reception (Azul Restaurant, La Paloma Resort)

7:00 pm Dinner

7:30 pm Giant Magellan Telescope Project

Presented by Wendy L. Freedman and Edward “Rocky” Kolb

Saturday, March 28 | Mirror Lab and Discussions 8:30 am Breakfast (La Paloma Resort)

9:30 am Depart for UA Mirror Lab Tour

10:00 am UA Mirror Lab Tour

12:00 pm Lunch (Cottonwood Room, La Paloma Resort)

12:30 pm The Accelerating Universe

Presented by Robert P. Kirshner

1:30 pm The Dark Energy Survey and the Mystery of Cosmic Acceleration

Presented by Joshua Frieman

2:30 pm Break

2:45 pm South Pole Telescope: Using Light from the Big Bang to Backlight the Universe

Presented by Bradford Benson

3:45 pm The Event Horizon Telescope: A Detailed Look at Black Holes

Presented by Daniel P. Marrone

5:00 pm End of session

7:30 pm Depart for dinner

7:45 pm Dinner (The Grill at Hacienda del Sol)

Sunday, March 29 | Brunch 9:30 am Brunch (Cottonwood Room, La Paloma Resort)

10:00 am Hubble Circle Update

Presented by Michael S. Turner and Angela V. Olinto

11:00 am Earth from Space: Weather Forecasting and Climate Monitoring

Presented by Jeffery J. Puschell

12:00 pm Extreme Universe Space Observatory at the Japanese Module

Presented by Angela V. Olinto

1:00 pm Immersion Concludes

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2015 Astro ImmersionWhat is the Hubble Circle?II.

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 29 11

The Hubble Circle is a group of philanthropic individuals who support the University’s goal to be a leader in

observational astronomy with gifts of $1 million or more.

Edwin Hubble (University of Chicago, AB in Physics 1910; PhD in Astronomy 1917) laid the foundation for

modern observational cosmology with his discovery that the universe extends beyond the Milky Way and that it

is expanding at a growing rate. It is in his spirit that the University of Chicago is advancing its stature as a leading

center of observational astronomy by joining the Magellan Consortium and becoming a founding partner for

the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).

Today’s cutting-edge research requires access to large, ground-based optical and infrared telescopes. The twin

6.5 meter Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in the Chilean Andes are widely acknowledged to

produce the best image quality currently available from a ground-based telescope. The GMT will be the world’s

largest telescope when it begins operations in 2021. By guaranteeing access to observatories that will stand at the

forefront of astronomical investigation in the 21st century, The University of Chicago will lead the next wave of

breakthrough discoveries that will change the way we think about the universe and our place in it.

To fully realize this vision, the University is recruiting members to the Hubble Circle. The support and involve-

ment of these visionaries will prove integral to enabling Chicago’s world-renowned cosmologists to harness the

new generation of optical telescopes in their quest to find answers to fundamental questions about the early

universe as well as the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Hubble Circle members will receive the following exclusive benefits:

- Sloan Digital Sky Survey Plate

- Invitation to annual Astro Immersion events

- Annual updates from the Astronomy & Astrophysics Chair and Kavli Director

- Invitations to travel to observational facilities in the United States, Chile and elsewhere

- Pre-publication notice of important discoveries

The Hubble Circle

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 29 13

Donald E. Butterfield and Ken Ishiwata

AB ’53 (General Studies)

Alec Neill Litowitz

JD ’93 and MBA ’93 (Finance and Accounting)

Michael Thomas Long

AB ’75 (Physics)

John McGrain

Friend of the University

John A. “Mac” McQuown and Leslie W. McQuown

Friends of the University

Nicholas J. Pritzker and Susan S. Pritzker

JD ’75

Jeffery J. Puschell and Dana Puschell

AB ’75 (Physics)

Reuben Sandler

SM ’58 (Mathematics) and PhD ’61 (Mathematics)

Thomas and Sharon Zimmerman

Friends of the University

Hubble Circle Members

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2015 Astro ImmersionSpeaker & Participant ProfilesIII.

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 29 17

Bradford Benson is an Associate Scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and an Assistant

Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Before becoming a professor, Dr. Benson

graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford Uni-

versity in 2004, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of

Chicago. Dr. Benson has published over 100 scientific papers. His scientific interests include clusters of galaxies,

radio and microwave wavelength detectors, and measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the 14

billion year old light from the Big Bang. Dr. Benson’s goal is to build instruments that can make observations

that answer some of the biggest questions in cosmology: What physics was responsible for the Big Bang? What

is the Universe made out of ? What is Dark Energy?

Gordon Freedman speaks and writes about change and technology in education and serves as an

advocate for advanced information systems, smart technologies, and big data analytics as agents in transforming

individual learning and institutional education. Mr. Freedman serves as president of the National Laboratory for

Education Transformation, a Silicon Valley non-profit devoted to the redesign of public education systems and

personal learning solutions, on par with corporate, consumer and governmental services. He is also the owner

and general manager of Knowledge Base, LLC, a higher education strategy consultancy established in 1998

to help education technology corporations, publishers, research institutes, museums and government agencies

manage their strategic transitions into technology and media-driven markets. From 2005 through the end of

2011, Mr. Freedman was Vice President of Global Education Strategy for Blackboard, Inc. and Executive Di-

rector of the Blackboard Institute. Prior his work in the education sector, he was a television and film executive

in Los Angles, where he was executive producer of the Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary A

Brief History of Time about Cambridge University physics professor Stephen Hawking. Earlier, Mr. Freedman

was a network news producer and a national reporter based in Washington, D.C. He began his career as a Con-

gressional staff member and investigator serving on committees in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Rep-

resentatives. Mr. Freedman is a graduate of Michigan State University and is a Fellow at SRI and was a Fellow at

University of California Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 2918

Wendy L. Freedman joined The University of Chicago faculty as University Professor of Astron-

omy and Astrophysics in September 2014, following a distinguished, thirty-year career at the Observatories

of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena. Among her scientific achievements at Carnegie, Professor

Freedman was a principle investigator for a team of thirty astronomers who carried out the Hubble Key Project

to measure the current expansion rate of the Universe, an effort that began in the mid-1980s while she was a

post-doctoral scholar at Carnegie and completed in 2001. For eleven years (2003-2014) Professor Freedman

served as the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Carnegie Observatories, and in 2003, was appointed

chair of the board of the Giant Magellan Telescope Project, a role she retains at Chicago. Her research interests

are directed at measuring both the current and past expansion rate of the universe, and in characterizing the

nature of dark energy, which is causing the expansion rate to accelerate. She is the Principal Investigator of a

program that uses the Spitzer Space Telescope to measure the Hubble constant to an accuracy of 3 percent.

Joshua Frieman is a senior staff member (Scientist III) in the Theoretical Astrophysics group at Fer-

milab and the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics. He is also Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics

at the University of Chicago, where he is a member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. After a

postdoc in the SLAC Theory Group, he joined the scientific staff at Fermilab in 1988 and served as Head of

the Theoretical Astrophysics Group from 1994 to 1999. Dr. Frieman’s research centers on theoretical and ob-

servational cosmology, including studies of the nature of dark energy, the early Universe, gravitational lensing,

the large-scale structure of the Universe, and supernovae as cosmological distance indicators. The author of over

275 publications, he led the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) Supernova Survey, served as chair of the SDSS

Collaboration Council, and as co-lead of the SDSS Large-scale Structure Working Group. He is a founder and

Director of the Dark Energy Survey, a collaboration of over 300 scientists from 25 institutions on 3 continents,

which built a 570-Megapixel camera to carry out a wide-field survey on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro

Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration. He is an Honorary

Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science. He is Vice-President and former Trustee of the Aspen Center for

Physics. Dr. Frieman earned a B.Sc. degree from Stanford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 29 19

Laurence Hill is Senior Associate Provost at the University of Chicago. He is responsible for coordinat-

ing the planning and resourcing of a broad range of strategic programmatic and capital initiatives across campus.

He is also responsible in the Provost’s office for integrating the use of long-range financial models and other

analytic infrastructure critical to launching and sustaining academic initiatives. Previously, Mr. Hill was the Se-

nior Associate Vice President for Program Development and National Laboratories, providing leadership for

science initiatives and joint research efforts with Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator

Laboratory. He also served as Assistant Dean for Research Operations in the Division of the Biological Sciences

(BSD) and the Pritzker School of Medicine, and before that, Assistant Dean for Planning in the BSD. Mr. Hill

received his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an M.A. in Religious Studies from

the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a B.A. from Indiana Wesleyan University.

Robert P. Kirshner is Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University. Professor Kirshner is an

author of over 300 research papers dealing with supernovae and observational cosmology. His work with the

“High-Z Supernova Team” on the acceleration of the Universe lead to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics which

was awarded to his students. Professor Kirshner and the High-Z Team shared in the Gruber Prize for Cosmolo-

gy in 2007 and the Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize in 2014. A member of the American Academy of

Arts and Sciences, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998 and the American Philosophical

Society in 2004. Caltech named him the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004 and he received an honorary

Doctor of Science from the University of Chicago in 2010. Professor Kirshner won the Dannie Heineman Prize

in Astrophysics in 2011, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, and in 2015 was named Physics Laureate by the

Wolf Foundation. His popular-level book, The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the

Accelerating Cosmos, won the AAP Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Physics and Astronomy.

Professor Kirshner graduated from Harvard College in 1970 and received a Ph.D. in Astronomy at Caltech.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 2920

Edward “Rocky” Kolb is Dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and the Arthur Holly

Compton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University

of Chicago. Dr. Kolb’s research applies elementary-particle physics to the very early Universe, including cosmic

inflation models, gravitational production of particles, particle dark matter, ultra-high energy cosmic rays, and

high-energy neutrino astronomy. In 1983, he and Michael Turner created the Theoretical Astrophysics group

at Fermilab, now the Center for Particle Astrophysics. Together, they co-authored the influential monograph,

The Early Universe, and shared the AAS/AIP Heineman Prize for their role in establishing the field of particle

astrophysics and cosmology. In addition to over 200 scientific papers, he co-authored the popular history Blind

Watchers of the Sky, which received the 1996 Emme Award of the American Aeronautical Society. Dr. Kolb

currently serves on the boards of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization and Adler Planetarium. He is a

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society. Mr. Kolb earned his

BA from the University of New Orleans and his PhD in Physics from the University of Texas, Austin. He holds

an honorary degree, Doctor Honoris Causa, from the University of Lyon in France.

Michael Long is co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of Premier Wireless, Inc. Started in 1993, Premier

Wireless designs and manufacturers wireless video, audio, and data systems for use in the CCTV, Broadcast,

Military, and Law Enforcement markets. Prior to founding Premier Wireless, Mr. Long was the President of

Dynatech Spectrum, a subsidiary of Dynatech Corporation. While there, Mr. Long was responsible for the

conception and marketing of one of the earliest wireless video systems to be offered to the CCTV market. He

has published a number of articles and is co-inventor on two patents. In 2009, Mr. Long joined the University

of Chicago’s Physical Sciences Division Visiting Committee and became a member of the Board of Trustees of

the Mt. Wilson Institute and Observatory. In 2012, he joined the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Institute

for Science. He served as Vice President of the Giant Magellan Telescope Corporation until 2014. He has a BS

in Physics from the University of Chicago with continued graduate studies at UCLA and Stanford University.

Daniel P. Marrone is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He was a

Hubble and Jansky fellow at the University of Chicago until joining the Arizona faculty in 2011. His research

addresses a variety of topics, including cosmology, the formation of galaxies in the early universe, and the physics

of black holes. In this work, Dr. Marrone makes use of cutting-edge astronomical facilities on the ground and

in space and often constructs new instruments to enable new types of observations. He is the author of more

than 100 refereed scientific publications and is a member of the American Astronomical Society. Dr. Marrone

received B.S. degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Minnesota in 2001 and his PhD in As-

tronomy from Harvard University in 2006.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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Lorel McMillan spent several decades writing about design and the arts for newspapers and magazines

in New York and in Chicago. Ms. McMillan has served as a trustee of Writers’ Theatre for fifteen years. In 2010,

she earned a MLA from the University of Chicago, informally concentrating on science in the early modern

period. She holds degrees from the Medill School of Journalism and Northwestern University.

Robert D. McMillan, M.D. is an orthopedic surgeon who has worked with Northshore Univer-

sity Health System throughout his career. With clinical teaching responsibilities first at Northwestern Universi-

ty and currently at the University of Chicago, Dr. McMillan also volunteers with medical education programs.

He received his medical training at Northwestern University and completed his residency at Cornell Universi-

ty’s Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. His is an avid golfer and ardent fly-fisherman.

Rowan Miranda is Vice President for Operations and Chief Financial Officer at the University of

Chicago. Mr. Miranda joined the University of Chicago as the Senior Associate Vice President for Finance and

Administration and Treasurer, and became the Interim Chief Financial Officer in August 2014. He previously

worked as the Associate Vice President for Finance at University of Michigan and, prior to that, as an executive

partner at Accenture, leading its North American Finance and Performance Management Service Line offerings

for government and higher education. He has held a number of faculty appointments over the last 20 years at the

University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Pittsburgh, as adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University,

and visiting faculty at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Most recently, he was an adjunct

professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. In addition to his B.S. in Ac-

counting and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Mr. Miranda holds an M.A.

and a Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Gary J. Morgenthaler is a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, focusing on investments in the soft-

ware and services industries. He was a past Director of Siri, Inc., which was acquired by Apple in April 2010

and BlueArc Corporation which was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems in September 2011. Gary is a current

Director of Nominum, NuoDB, OneChip Photonics and Overture Networks. Gary was also a co-founder and

past CEO of Illustra Information Technologies, Inc., where he served as a Chairman of Illustra’s Board until its

acquisition by Informix in 1996. He also served as Director of Catena Networks (acquired by Ciena (CIEN)),

Nuance Communications, and Premisys Communications and led the firm’s investments in Force10 Networks

and QuickLogic. From 1980 until 1989, Gary co-founded and served as CEO and Chairman of Ingres Cor-

poration, a leading relational database software company. Previously he was with McKinsey & Co. as a manage-

ment consultant, with Tymshare in software development and management, and with Stanford University in

software research and development. He received a BA from Harvard University.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 2922

Catherine “Cathy” Odelbo is the Executive Vice President of Global Corporate Strategy at

Morningstar, Inc. Ms. Odelbo joined Morningstar in 1988 as a mutual fund analyst and from 1995 to 2000

served as Senior Vice President of Content Development, as well as publisher and editor of stock and closed-

end fund research. In 2000, she was named President of Retail, overseeing all print and online products for in-

dividual investors. Ms. Odelbo was president of Morningstar’s global Equity and Credit Research division from

2009 until she assumed her current role in 2012. She holds a BA in American History and an MBA from the

University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where she graduated with honors. Ms. Odelbo is a member of

the Phi Beta Kappa Society and The Chicago Network.

Orjan Odelbo was born and raised in Sweden, but has been a Chicagoan for twenty years since he and

Cathy were married in 1995. He is a photographer by trade, and a full-time dad to their two teenaged children,

Signe (16) and Victor (14). His photography is now his art rather than a profession. Mr. Odelbo enjoys sports,

running, and Belgian beer.

Angela V. Olinto is the Homer J. Livingston Professor and Chair of the Department of Astronomy and

Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. She is the U.S. PI of the JEM-EUSO space mission and a member

of the international collaboration of the Pierre Auger Observatory, both designed to discover the origin of the

highest energy cosmic rays. She has made significant contributions to inflationary theory, the study of cosmic

magnetic fields, the nature of the dark matter, and the origin of the highest energy cosmic particles: cosmic rays,

gamma-rays, and neutrinos. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Chair of their Division of

Astrophysics. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was a trustee of the

Aspen Center for Physics, and has served on many advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences,

Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Professor Olinto received her B.S. in Physics from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,

and her Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 29 23

Jeffery J. Puschell is Principal Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Se-

gundo, California. He is an internationally recognized expert in the system engineering of space-based imaging

and remote sensing systems. The author or co-author of more than 100 papers on a variety of topics in astrophys-

ics, space-based imaging and remote sensing and optical communication, he holds several patents for innovative

passive and active remote sensors. He also chairs the Industrial Advisory Board for the Center for Metamaterials,

headquartered at City University of New York, and is a member of the US Department of Commerce Emerging

Technology and Research Advisory Committee. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Remote

Sensing and Chair for the SPIE Remote Sensing System Engineering Conference. Dr. Puschell received his AB

in Physics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Minnesota. In

addition to being a Raytheon Principal Fellow, he is a SPIE Fellow, and an Associate Fellow of the AIAA.

David Rousso is Founder and President of Pulse-ET. Founded in 2013, Pulse-ET designs and imple-

ments business analytics solutions for healthcare and public sector clients. Mr. Rousso is also an Executive Pro-

ducer on Station: Science at the Frontier, a series dedicated to exploring the science taking place on the Inter-

national Space Station. Prior to this, Mr. Rousso was Founded and President of EISCO Technology, an IT

consulting company that he sold to Logicalis in 2005. He stayed on as a Senior Account Executive at Logicalis

until the founding of Pulse-ET. Mr. Rousso also serves on the Board of Directors of the Art Center of Highland

Park and Kids Rank. He earned his B.A. from Northwestern University and his MBA from the University of

Michigan Ross School of Business.

Reuben Sandler has been Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc.,

a research and development company that has been creating technologies in optical sensing and instrumenta-

tion since 1999. He retired as Chairman in 2006 and remains CEO today. Prior to that, he was Executive Vice

President for Makoff R&D Laboratories, Inc. before becoming President and Chief Information Officer for

MediVox, Inc., a medical software development company. Dr. Sandler currently serves on the Board of Directors

of Optech Ventures, LLC and the Board of Directors of IPCreate. Dr. Sandler is the author of four books on

the subject of mathematics and has held professorships at Victoria University of Wellington, the University of

Chicago, the University of Illinois, Chicago, the University of Hawaii, and Technion University of Haifa. Mr.

Sandler joined the Physical Sciences Visiting Committee in 2006. He earned his undergraduate and PhD in

Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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2015 Astro Immersion | April 27 – 2924

Michael S. Turner is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute

for Cosmological Physics at The University of Chicago where he has been a faculty member since 1980. Trained

in general relativity and particle physics, Dr. Turner began to explore the connections between particle physics

and astrophysics and cosmology, and helped pioneer the interdisciplinary field of particle astrophysics and cos-

mology. In 1983, he and Edward W. “Rocky” Kolb created the Theoretical Astrophysics group at Fermilab, now

the Center for Particle Astrophysics. Together, they co-authored the influential monograph, The Early Universe,

and shared the AAS/AIP Heineman Prize for their role in establishing the field of particle astrophysics and

cosmology. Dr. Turner’s research has also been recognized with the APS’s Lilienfeld Prize, and the American

Astronomical Society’s Warner Prize; he is a Fellow of the American Physics Society, the American Association

for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences and a winner of the Klopsted

Prize of the American Association for Physics Teachers. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in

1997 and is the past Chair of its Physics Section. Dr. Turner received his BS in physics from Caltech, his M.S.

and PhD degrees from Stanford University, and an honorary D.Sc. from Michigan State University.

Joan Winstein has been active at the University of Chicago for many years. After a long corporate bank-

ing career, she formed Loan Strategies, Inc. to provide consulting to banks and creditors, specializing in restruc-

turing, renegotiating, and resolving problem loan portfolios. She is Trustee for the Peter F. Drucker Literary

Works Trust, a docent for the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and has in the past served on the Govern-

ing Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as well as a number of educational organizations. Her late

husband, Bruce Winstein, was the Allison Distinguished Service Professor in the Physics Department at the

University of Chicago. Ms. Winstein holds a BA in Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania, an AM in Far

Eastern Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and an MBA from Golden Gate University.

Speaker & Participant Profiles

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A. Articles for Professor Wendy L. Freedman and Dean Edward “Rocky” Kolb: Giant Magellan Telescope Project

2015 Astro ImmersionReading MaterialsIV.

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2015 Astro ImmersionReading MaterialsIV.

B. Articles for Professor Robert P. Kirshner: The Accelerating Universe

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2015 Astro ImmersionReading MaterialsIV.

C. Articles for Professor Joshua Frieman: The Dark Energy Survey and the Mystery of Cosmic Acceleration

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2015 Astro ImmersionReading MaterialsIV.

D. Articles for Assistant Professor Bradford Benson: South Pole Telescope: Using Light from the Big Bang to Backlight the Universe

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36 | NewScientist | 25 May 2013

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The most inhospitable places on Earth are the best spots to witness the birth of the universe, finds Govert Schilling

Pole position

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25 May 2013 | NewScientist | 37

>

Penetrating the darkness

Braving the extremes is all in a day’s work at the South Pole Telescope

I

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38 | NewScientist | 25 May 2013

High and dry

AMiBA in Hawaii (left), EBEX detector (bottom left) and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (right)

The Polarbear experiment in Chile is almost 5200 metres up

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25 May 2013 | NewScientist | 39

Govert Schilling is an astronomy writer based in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. He spent a week in Antarctica and the South Pole in December 2012 as a selected media visitor of the US National Science Foundation’s Antarctic ProgramPO

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2015 Astro ImmersionReading MaterialsIV.

E. Articles for Professor Daniel P. Marrone: The Event Horizon Telescope: A Detailed Look at Black Holes

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20 February 2012 sky & telescope

Imaging a Black Hole

A planet-wide telescope sets its sights on the well-kept secrets of black holes.

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SkyandTelescope.com February 2012 21

Camille M. Carlisle

Millions of them dot the Milky Way’s disk in stellar binary systems, gorging on material from their compan-ion stars. Supermassive beasts lurk in the cores of most large galaxies and may even influence their hosts’ forma-tion and evolution.

But even though black holes appear to be just about everywhere, we’ve never actually seen one. That might seem a moot point, considering they swallow light. Nev-ertheless, as excellent as the circumstantial evidence is for their existence, black holes may not look how we think they do. Nor does current evidence prove the veracity of general relativity (GR), Einstein’s theory of gravity that predicts — much to its creator’s horror — the formation of these compact massive objects. We don’t even know for certain that relativity’s description of spacetime, and black holes, is correct: GR has never been tested in strong gravi-tational fields like those created by gargantuan black holes.

All that may be about to change. Astronomers across the world are joining forces to create the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of radio observatories that will stretch from the South Pole to Hawaii and southern Europe. These antennas will work together like a single planet-sized dish, peering into galactic hearts to study what happens near the event horizon, the closest distance light can approach before a black hole’s gravity drags it so deep inside that we can no longer see it falling in. The EHT should unmask black holes, revealing how they feed and grow. More important, it will put everything we know — or think we know — about gravity to the test.

The SilhouetteSo far GR has passed every test, from explaining delays in satellite signals to predicting the orbits of neutron stars (S&T: August 2010, page 28). But Newtonian mechan-ics also passed many tests in the two centuries between its publication and Einstein’s theory of gravity. And physicists are well aware that GR fails to describe the microscopic realm, where they have to turn to quantum mechanics. The question is, how far can GR be pushed?

To answer this question, astronomers must probe where Newtonian mechanics breaks down: the innermost stable circular orbit, or ISCO (S&T: May 2011, page 20). The ISCO is the closest path material can follow around a black hole without falling in. But even though material inside the ISCO may still lie outside the event horizon,

that material will eventually plunge into the black hole, no matter how fast it’s going.

“Newton would look at that orbit and say ‘That’s crazy,’” says EHT project leader Sheperd Doeleman (MIT Haystack Observatory). There’s no ISCO in Newtonian gravity: as long as material stays outside the object it’s circling, it will continue to orbit, without spiraling in. But in GR, a black hole’s gravitational potential is proportional to 1/r3 (r is the distance between the black hole and an orbiting particle) instead of the 1/r of Newtonian theory — which means the well sinks a whole lot more near the black hole in GR than Newtonian theory predicts. This effect overwhelms even the centrifugal energy of orbital motion. Circular paths become unstable, and like a penny in a coin vortex, material plunges past the event horizon.

CAPTURING THE BEAST Famously camera-shy, black holes may finally reveal themselves to astronomers’ careful gaze in the next decade. This simulated image shows what our Milky Way’s central black hole might look like to the Event Horizon Telescope, with the silhouette created by the extreme bending of light from accreting matter around the object.

These days, black holes are about as common as dust bunnies.

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WHAT IS A BL ACK HOLE?A black hole is an object that is so massive and compact that it creates an inescapable, four-dimensional pit in spacetime. But a black hole is not made of matter: it doesn’t have a hard surface. From the inside, a black hole is a cosmic whirlpool, an object made of warped spacetime, whose outer “edge” is the event horizon. From the outside, though, a black hole can be completely described with just three numbers: its spin, mass, and electric charge. Generally there’s no overall charge, so charge can be ignored, reducing the variables to two.

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22 February 2012 sky & telescope

Imaging a Black Hole

GR simulations make specific predictions about how the near-ISCO environment should appear to EHT scopes. If a disk of gas and dust surrounds a black hole, the event horizon should look like a dark silhouette, surrounded by the glow of accreting material and framed with streaks of light. The silhouette effect happens for two reasons. First, light is fighting to survive. The black hole sits in the midst of glowing accreting material heated by friction and gravitational acceleration. But toward the disk’s center, light has to struggle to escape the indentation the black hole makes in the fabric of spacetime. As a photon loses energy, its wavelength becomes longer, until it’s stretched to infinity and right out of existence.

The second and prevailing reason for the silhouette effect is what happens to radiation emitted by material on the event horizon’s far side. The black hole blocks this light from our direct view, but it gravitationally lenses this radiation to curve around the central object to where we can see it, creating a darker center. The lensed light should form long streaks around the silhouette, look-ing rather like the diamond ring of a total solar eclipse — except in this image the light is emitted at radio wavelengths, not optical. While this radiation is gravita-tionally redshifted by the time it reaches us, the effect is insubstantial: a photon originating from the ISCO with a wavelength of 1.06 mm arrives at Earth at 1.3 mm.

These processes create what looks like a shadow but isn’t. And how streaks stretch around the silhouette depends on how the black hole’s gravity lenses light near the ISCO — which depends on what kind of grav-ity astronomers are dealing with. If observations reveal unforeseen phenomena (such as bizarre silhouette shapes), it could indicate that Einstein’s theory breaks down in strong gravity.

Images also depend on how matter accretes onto black holes. Material falling in radially (that is, without orbit-ing) onto a nonspinning black hole would create a sym-metrical image with a central “shadow.” But if the accret-ing material is orbiting the black hole, the image will appear asymmetrical because material moving toward us looks brighter due to relativistic effects.

That’s all in theory. While theorists have constructed excellent models over the past three decades of what goes on around black holes, they need observations to confirm

VIEWING ANGLES Depending on how the accre-tion disk around our galaxy’s central black hole is tilted to our line of sight, light from an orbiting hot spot could be lensed in a variety of ways. This sequence moves from looking down at the disk from above to seeing it from its side, with the spot behind the hole. The strength of the black hole’s gravity determines how light bends near the event horizon.

A SINGULAR NEIGHBORHOOD Although gas and dust obscure the Milky Way’s center in visible light, its innermost parts show clearly in this radio image made using data from the NRAO’s Very Large Array. The diagonal orientation results from the Milky Way’s disk (Earth’s orbit around the Sun is inclined to the galactic plane). Inside the Sgr A region hides the black hole known as Sgr A*.

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SkyandTelescope.com February 2012 23

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them. As Abraham Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) explains, “It would be very instructive to see, for the first time, how nature does it in reality.”

Acquiring TargetThe EHT’s first target is Sagittarius A* (abbreviated Sgr A* and pronounced “A-star”), the supermassive black hole candidate at the center of our Milky Way. Measure-ments by UCLA and Max Planck Institute astronomers have pegged our galaxy’s beast at roughly 4 million solar masses by measuring the orbital motions of stars in the galactic center. At 26,000 light-years’ distance, Sgr A*’s event horizon will appear 53 microarcseconds wide. That’s about the size of a poppy seed in Los Angeles seen from New York City. Even so, Sgr A* has the largest apparent event horizon of any black hole candidate.

Astronomers plan to zoom in on this minuscule target with a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. VLBI combines observations from radio telescopes far away from one another into a single enhanced image, just as though astronomers had used one big dish that spanned the distance between the scopes. Because a telescope’s theoretical resolution improves as its diameter increases, VLBI dramatically improves observing capabilities. The diameter of a “virtual” radio telescope stretching from Hawaii to Chile, for example, has the same resolution as that of a single dish 9,450 kilometers (about 5,870 miles) wide. Astronomers at different locations must observe simultaneously, but they can combine their observations to create a single, cohesive picture.

In 2007 EHT astronomers led by Doeleman observed Sgr A* using a three-station VLBI array that combined the Arizona Radio Observatory’s 10-meter Submillimeter Telescope (ARO/SMT), a 10-meter element of the Com-bined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) in California, and the 15-meter James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) atop Mauna Kea. Observing in the 1.3-mm (230-GHz) band, the astronomers detected structure in the ionized gas right around Sgr A* at a dis-tance of roughly four times the size of the event horizon (S&T: March 2010, page 14).

But astronomers don’t yet know what that structure is. “You can’t reconstruct the image from only three tele-scopes,” says Doeleman. “So I know there’s something com-

pact there, I know there’s something about the size of the event horizon, but I can’t tell you exactly what it looks like. To do that, we have to extend the VLBI to more telescopes.”

The observations constrained Sgr A*’s angular size to 37 microarcseconds, which translates to a physical diam-eter of about four-tenths of an astronomical unit (a.u.). You’ll notice that that number is smaller than the event horizon’s size: Doeleman and his colleagues think the Sgr A* source may be a bright spot in an accretion disk or a jet that is slightly offset from the unseen black hole.

In April 2009 the astronomers added a second CARMA scope and spotted a flare in Sgr A* that appeared between the second and third observing days. This variability matches similar activity seen in other multiwavelength campaigns, bolstering the claim of event-horizon-scale structure. VLBI measurements also show that the Milky Way’s central black hole probably doesn’t spin very fast and that its accretion disk is more edge-on than face-on from our vantage point.

Violence Unmasked: M87EHT astronomers also want to tackle the center of M87. This giant elliptical galaxy lies roughly 52 million light-

ALL OVER THE MAP Capturing a black hole takes a planet-sized telescope — or a planet covered in telescopes working together. Shown are the various international sites participating, or expected to participate, in Event Horizon Telescope observations.

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years away, 2,000 times farther than Sgr A*. Astronomers think that a 6.4-billion-solar-mass black hole (more than 1,000 times more massive than Sgr A*) lurks in M87’s core. A black hole of that extreme mass would have an event horizon roughly 135 a.u. wide, just larger than the Kuiper Belt. But at M87’s distance, the event horizon’s angular size would be less than 8 microarcseconds — amazingly small, and yet this tiny horizon is the second largest candidate after the Milky Way’s black hole. Lens-ing effects may make the accretion disk’s inner edge appear larger, too, between 34 and 54 microarcseconds.

M87 is also fascinating because its core emits incredible amounts of radiation. Such active galaxies can produce 1 trillion times the Sun’s energy, all in a region smaller than our solar system. Many active galactic nuclei shoot jets of plasma into intergalactic space (S&T: April 2010, page 20); M87’s single visible jet stretches 5,000 light-years long.

Last September Japanese scientists not involved with the EHT reported VLBI measurements suggesting that M87’s jet begins at a fixed point 14 to 23 times the event horizon’s diameter from the black hole. That distance is surprisingly small: previous studies of jets that point straight at Earth had suggested separations thousands of times larger. But M87’s jet is somewhat sideways from

Earth’s point of view, so the Japanese astronomers could see how the stream’s bright, unresolved base changes location with wavelength, appearing to narrow in on the black hole’s location. The team observed at six wave-lengths from 2 to 43 GHz using an array of 10 antennas stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. With that span they could resolve details 400 times finer than Hubble can in optical light. Resolution at EHT wave-lengths should be several times better and should allow radio astronomers to directly image both the jet’s origin and accretion flow around the black hole.

M87 is a particularly attractive target because its light output varies on a much longer timescale than Sgr A*. Why these sources vary isn’t definitively known. Fluctua-tions may be caused by “hot spots” in the accretion disk, which appear to flare as they approach us.

These structural changes during observing runs will smear images, reducing resolution and making it more difficult to image a black hole’s silhouette. But high-fre-quency VLBI should be able to resolve changing structure from orbiting hot spots by capturing snapshots over short time intervals. Source signals can then be summed to reflect how the structure changes with time. Watching these changes will allow EHT astronomers to time hot-

Blackhole

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Jet’s base

JET SETTER Three shots of M87’s long jet, each in a dif-ferent wavelength range (purple is X-ray, blue is radio, pink is optical), all show the same bright core (lower left in each image) coincident with the galaxy’s nucleus.

X-RAY: NASA / CXC / MIT / H. MARSHALL ET AL.; RADIO: F. ZHOU, F. OWEN (NRAO), J. BIRETTA (STSCI); OPTICAL: NASA / STSCI / UMBC / E. PERLMAN ET AL.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER STREAM Deep inside the elliptical galaxy M87, a super-massive black hole creates a high-speed jet that shoots from the galaxy’s center. Recent observations suggest the jet indeed begins at a fixed point; everything shown here hides in the jet’s bright core (shown below).

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SkyandTelescope.com February 2012 25

spot orbits, and because hot spots are close to the black hole, their orbits move through relativistic anomalies not described by Newtonian gravity. By clocking these orbits, observers can test predictions of spacetime’s structure near the ISCO.

“I honestly think that the real gold mine will be the non-imaging observations in which we monitor the time variability of Sgr A*,” says Doeleman. By timing “blob” orbits near the ISCO, the team can also estimate the black hole’s spin by comparing the measured orbital period with the predicted one to see if the monster’s spin is speeding up disk rotation. It is these orbits, even more than the silhouette, that will determine how closely Ein-stein’s predictions match reality.

What’s NextThe EHT project has made great strides in the last few years, but there’s still a long road ahead. With more than a dozen contributing institutes in Asia, North America, and Europe, the astronomers have many details to iron out.

One detail is the installation of masers — devices that

use stimulated microwave emission from atoms to keep time. Because the EHT will combine observations con-ducted simultaneously around the world, accurate clocks are essential: the masers lose only a second over 100 mil-lion years. But some facilities’ masers need maintenance, and others don’t even have one yet.

Telescope modifications and various measurements also have to be made. To properly reconstruct the observations back at Haystack Observatory — Doeleman’s home base and EHT headquarters — astronomers need to know each observing site’s location to within a couple of feet. Such exactitude can take hours to calibrate, and earthquakes and spreading tectonic plates change site locations over time.

Achieving finer resolution will be the key to success. EHT astronomers plan to improve resolution in part by moving to shorter wavelengths. They’re particularly focused on the 0.8-mm (345-GHz) band which, along with 1.3 mm (which Doeleman’s team used in 2007 and 2009), is one of two main atmospheric windows in the milli- meter/submillimeter range.

The challenge with 345 GHz is weather. Atmospheric

MANY EYES MAKE LIGHT WORK The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is taking shape in the northern Chilean desert. Only a fraction of the planned 66 antennas appear in this photo.

THE EVENT HORIZONYou don’t have to be Einstein to calculate the radius of a black hole’s event horizon. In 1783 British natural philosopher John Michell predicted the existence of “dark stars” using Newtonian mechanics. He described an object that was compact enough that light particles leaving its surface would be slowed and then pulled back down by the star’s gravity. Although photons don’t actually slow down as Michell and others hypothesized, the formula for calculating a star’s critical radius remains the same. For a nonspinning black hole, the event horizon’s radius is R=2GM/c2 where G is Newton’s gravitational constant and c is the speed of light.

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26 February 2012 sky & telescope

Imaging a Black Hole

water vapor can interfere with observations at this wave-length, making “high and dry” site conditions crucial. Astronomers have had some success with monitoring water-vapor fluctuations during observations and sub-tracting the effects from data later. EHT scientists also plan to use the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a network of 66 radio telescopes being assembled in northern Chile. Although ALMA has only about a third of its dishes in place it has already released its first images and begun an observing program. Astro-nomers will soon use the array to look at how Sgr A*’s behavior changes at different wavelengths, and the EHT team has already received international funding to phase ALMA with the global network.

ALMA is a “change in the firmament of VLBI,” says Doeleman. Quite possibly the largest astronomy project in history, when completed it will have a resolution of less than 20 milliarcseconds at 345 GHz. If the EHT team can combine ALMA with seven to ten other antennas, astrono-mers should achieve an angular resolution of 20 microarc-seconds or better, clearly revealing Sgr A*’s silhouette.

EHT astronomers are hoping for a final list of stations committed to the project by 2015. During that time more

facilities will come online, including the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), a joint American-Mexican project east of Mexico City that achieved first light last summer and has already signed onto the endeavor.

Meanwhile, observations are coming closer to reveal-ing the secrets of black holes. Many astronomers are confident in the EHT, and the project received a thumb’s up from the Astro2010 Decadal Survey. “We have the necessary technology and it was demonstrated to work on a smaller-scale project,” says Loeb. “I think it’s likely that the project will be successful.”

Doeleman agrees. Advances in VLBI and our under-standing of galactic centers make it almost certain that astronomers will directly image black hole silhouettes within the next decade, he says. And as new instruments come online, radio astronomers will want to observe at these wavelengths for a variety of projects, making observa-tion time harder to come by in the future. Now is the time for the EHT, says Doeleman. “We should be bold.” ✦

Camille M. Carlisle is a former S&T intern who recently returned to the staff as assistant editor. This article is based on work from her MIT master’s thesis, “Heart of Darkness.”

TEAMWORK Members of the Event Horizon Telescope project (plus one eavesdropper: the author is in the back row) gathered at the MIT Haystack Observatory in January 2010 to hash out their strategy. Sheperd Doeleman stands third from left in the back row.

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www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 335 27 JANUARY 2012 391

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build up a high-resolution image of dis-tant objects.

In a sense, EHT has begun observ-ing already. For several years, Doele-man, Marrone, and colleagues have been observing Sgr A* using dishes in

Hawaii, Arizona, and California. They have seen features of the galactic center

on the same scale as the black hole, although they don’t yet have the resolution to image its surface, the event horizon. To improve reso-lution they need to use shorter wavelengths, a longer baseline, or both. The shorter wave-lengths are on the way: The team hopes soon to switch its observations from light with a wavelength of 1.3 millimeters to 0.83 milli-meters—fortuitously, a wavelength in which the material of the galactic plane is relatively transparent. But they are “pushing up to near the limit of the radio window in the atmo-sphere,” Marrone says.

To extend the baseline will require more telescopes. About a dozen around the world either are equipped to work at such short wavelengths or can be adapted relatively cheaply. In addition, EHT needs to incorpo-rate the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submil-limeter Array (ALMA) in Chile (Science, 30 September 2011, p. 1820). ALMA’s 66 dishes high in the Andes will match the collecting power of a 90-meter-wide dish. “ALMA is key because of its enormous collecting power and sensitivity,” says theorist Dimitrios Psaltis of the Steward Observatory. It is also far from other observatories, creating a long baseline.

EHT researchers at Hay-stack have won $4 million from the U.S. National Sci-ence Foundation to equip ALMA for VLBI. ALMA, which is not yet complete, should be ready to play a part in EHT by 2015. To get an even longer baseline, the project would also like to enlist the South Pole Tele-scope (Science, 16 March 2007, p. 1523), but it will require upgrading to make it suitable.

EHT’s enthusiastic reception at Tucson has set the ball rolling, and researchers have set up a committee to work out the details of an international collaboration. “We’re aiming for an MOU [memorandum of understanding] this summer, though tests and work will go on under the current, less formal, arrangements,” Marrone says. –DANIEL CLERYC

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The center of our galaxy—surrounded by a maelstrom of stars, gas, and dust, and sepa-rated from us by 26,000 light-years of space filled with all the detritus of the galactic plane—is one of the most challenging things for astronomers to observe. Last week, astron-omers gathered in Tucson, Arizona, to work out a plan to combine data from radio tele-scopes worldwide and create, in effect, a dish the size of Earth. With such a virtual instru-ment, they say, they’ll be able to peer into our galaxy’s heart and see the supermassive black hole that resides there.

“It would be an amazing thing. It’s never been done before, getting an image of a black hole,” says one of the project’s organizers, astronomer Daniel Marrone of the Univer-sity of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, agrees. “This is a very, very important thing to do,” he says. Despite such enthusiasm, however, it’s not yet clear how a worldwide collaboration would be organized or funded. “Most of the relevant telescopes had someone present [in Tucson], and all wanted to make it work. But there was no real consensus on how to do it,” says Falcke, who, along with two colleagues, fi rst suggested in 2000 that such observations might be possible (Science, 7 January 2000, p. 65).

The organizational details are “still in fl ux,” says Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolo-gy’s Haystack Observatory in Westford and principal investigator of the project, known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). But with such a tantalizing scientifi c goal and an estimated cost of a few million dollars to upgrade instruments at some telescopes, “I

don’t see problems getting the resources,” Doeleman says.

Black holes are extremely diffi cult to see directly because they emit no light, except possibly the proposed very faint Hawking radiation. Astronomers have inferred the presence of black holes by observing nearby gas or orbiting stars. Being able to observe one directly would be a huge advance for astrophysicists. “Black holes may be part of our everyday lives, but they haven’t been proven. No one has seen an event horizon,” Falcke says. As well as obtaining proof, direct observation would allow astronomers to study how black holes swallow up nearby material, a process known as accretion, and how the jets of mate-rial often seen coming out of them form. They could also conduct precise tests of general relativity, some-thing never done in such a strong gravitational fi eld.

Our galaxy’s central black hole, known as Sagit-tarius A* (Sgr A*), is thought to be 4 million times as mas-sive as the sun but only 30 times as wide, smaller than Mercury’s orbit. Proponents of EHT believe they can image it—or rather, see its “shadow” against a bright background of hot gas—using a tech-nique known as very long baseline interferom-etry (VLBI). It takes data from widely spaced dishes and combines them as if they were two small patches of a large dish. A VLBI array lacks the light-collecting power of a full dish its size, but with enough small patches it can

Worldwide Telescope Aims to Look Into Milky Way Galaxy’s Black Heart

AST R O N O M Y

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gas around a black hole.

Global coverage. Radio telescopes that could play

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Permanent Address: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/dark-star-diaries/2015/02/26/hunting-black-holes-at-the-south-pole/

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The South Pole Telescope. Credit: Daniel Luong-Van,National Science Foundation

Hunting Black Holes at the South PoleBy Seth Fletcher | February 26, 2015

Each of the telescopes that the astronomers of the Event HorizonTelescope (EHT) are currently working to bring into their black-hole-observing, planet-size array is a special case. Mexico’s Large Millimeter Telescope,for example, is an enormous single dish on top of an exceptionally high mountain, not tomention the biggest science project of any kind in its country. The Atacama LargeMillimeter Array (ALMA) is a billion-dollar class instrument, the world’s most powerfulradio telescope.

The South Pole Telescope is a special case in several ways. First, the obvious: it’s at theSouth Pole. That makes it incredibly hard to get to even in good weather, and completelyinaccessible during the austral winter. But there are less obvious distinguishing

characteristics as well. For one, the South Pole Telescope was designed for the very specific task of studying the cosmic microwavebackground—something completely different than what the astronomers of the EHT want it to do.

Which is why last December, University of Arizona-Tucson astronomer and EHT collaborator Dan Marrone flew, along with severalcolleagues, to the South Pole. Their job was to install the gear the South Pole Telescope would need to join the EHT in observing blackholes.

Normally, the South Pole Telescope’s 10-meter dish funnels extremely faint radiation from the cosmic microwave background into acamera called a bolometer. “That camera effectively just measures the heat from the sky in a given direction by sensing how much theaccumulated light heats each detector,” Marrone explains. To do Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the technique used by theEvent Horizon Telescope, the SPT needs a different kind of camera—a single-pixel instrument that records the waveform of microwaves(specifically those with a frequency of 230 GHz) hitting the telescope. With that single, highly sensitive pixel, Marrone explains, “we canactually record a ‘movie’ of the electric field that the radiation from our targets is creating on the surface of the telescope.”

Eventually, during a full Event Horizon Telescope observing run, telescopes around the world will record such a “movie” on banks of8-terabyte hard drives, then ship them back to MIT’s Haystack Observatory near Boston, where scientists will combine the datacollected at all sites using a supercomputer called a correlator.

By the time Marrone left Tucson on December 1, his team had already shipped 13 crates of equipment to the Pole. When Marronearrived on December 9, only two of those crates were waiting for him. “It turns out never to be easy to do anything at the South Pole,”Marrone says.

For the first couple of weeks, as cargo trickled in, Marrone and his colleagues did what work they could. Space was tight, and thebuilding was under construction. “For the first month and a half we were there, every day there was someone soldering with anacetylene torch in our ear, filling the air with weird acrid smoke,” Marrone says. When last of the straggling cargo arrived in lateDecember, “we could really fly, and so we did,” Marrone says. “They were very long days. We’d stagger out at 8 or 8:30 am, come backfor lunch or dinner and work until midnight. Christmas, New Year’s, it didn’t matter.”

In mid January, Marrone and crew finished their installation and pointed the modified telescope at the sky. They obtained first lightwith the South Pole Telescope VLBI receiver early on January 16, local time, making images by scanning their single pixel across the sky

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Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc., used with permission

© 2013 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

and, in Marrone’s words, “making maps of the pixel value recorded for each sky position.”

The official first light image, signed by the South Pole installation crew, is a map of carbon monoxide near the center of the Milky Way.

A molecular cloud near the galactic center as seenby the modified South Pole Telescope. Credit: DanMarrone

Another image depicts the moon at 230 gigahertz. “Instead of seeing reflected light, you see the heat escaping from the moon’s surface,”Marrone says. “Notably the crescent is wider at 1mm than in the optical, because the parts of the moon that have just lost the sunlightare still cooling. You can also see real signatures of the dark and light patches that you’re used to seeing with your eye.”

The moon at 230 GHz, captured by the South PoleTelescope. Credit: Dan Marrone

These are just test images, but they prove that the equipment that will allow the South Pole Telescope to join the Event HorizonTelescope works. The next step will be to link the South Pole Telescope up with another, faraway telescope. The SPT and the AtacamaPathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile observed together not long after the SPT recorded the images above, and the resultingdata is currently being analyzed at Haystack Observatory. If “fringes” emerge, it will be a big step toward getting the full EHT arrayready to take a picture of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

About the Author: Seth Fletcher is a senior editor. Follow on Twitter @seth_fletcher.

More »

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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2015 Astro ImmersionReading MaterialsIV.

F. Articles for Jeffery J. Puschell: Earth from Space: Weather Forecasting and Climate Monitoring

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10.1117/2.1201410.005608

An improved satellite imagerfor year-round Arctic monitoringJeffery Puschell

Highly sensitive visible/near-IR imagers in elliptical orbits providefrequently updated information on Arctic weather and sea ice condi-tions, even through the long polar night.

Routine satellite monitoring of the Arctic is critical to a hostof environmental applications. Surveillance enables weatherforecasting and studies of climate change, sea ice conditions,and natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions that affect com-mercial activities and transportation. However, coverage of theregion by current space-based imaging systems is insufficient.Imagers onboard traditional geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO)environmental satellites, such as the US’s GeostationaryOperational Environmental Satellite and the European Meteosat,image the full Earth disk as seen from the satellites’ assignedlongitude every 15–30 minutes, but they provide poor coverageof high latitudes, and cannot reach the center of the Arctic.Imaging radiometers onboard the other major type of traditionalenvironmental satellite—those in sun-synchronous polar orbitsthat revisit the Arctic approximately every 100 minutes—do notalways cover the entire region on every pass. These limitationsreduce the systems’ effectiveness for monitoring rapidly chang-ing environmental conditions. We need satellites that providecontinuous coverage of the Arctic and that host instruments withimage refresh rates similar to, or better than, those of GEOsystems.

We can meet these requirements using compact, wide-field-of-view (�18◦) imagers that operate onboard satellites in a highlyelliptical orbit (HEO). These collect continuous multispectral,high-sensitivity visible and near-IR Arctic imagery both day andnight. We conceived such imagers based on the remarkable andunprecedented success of an instrument known as the Visible IRImaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) operating onboard the SuomiNational Polar Partnership satellite. We are currently developinga second VIIRS flight unit for the National Oceanic and At-mospheric Administration/NASA Joint Polar Satellite System.VIIRS includes a high-sensitivity, day-night band (DNB)1 that ispanchromatic (sensitive to all visible colors) and collects highly

Figure 1. Images from the Visible IR Imaging Radiometer Suite(VIIRS) Day-Night Band (DNB) system of Alaska and the Chukchiand Beaufort Seas taken under moonlight. DNB provides high-contrastimagery even under the low thermal contrast conditions prevalent inthe Arctic winter. (Image reproduced with permission from CIRA: theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Insti-tute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.)

detailed imagery of the Arctic even under low light levels (seeFigure 1). VIIRS DNB imagery has vastly superior informationcontent compared with emissive or thermal IR imagery collectedat the same time under the very low thermal contrast conditionsthat occur frequently in the Arctic during winter (see Figure 2).The imagery is enabling significant improvements in forecastingweather and sea ice changes.

Our HEO day-night imager (HDNI) concept would use thistechnology to collect wide-dynamic-range imagery beyond the

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Figure 2. VIIRS imagery in the MI5 spectral band (left) and the DNB (right) of the western Chukchi Sea. Note how the sea ice structure and othersurface detail so readily apparent in the DNB image is not visible at all in the thermal IR image. (Image reproduced with permission from CIRA.)

VIIRS DNB, with spectral coverage (three color, versus singlebroad band), radiometric sensitivity, and spatial resolution thatare better than the DNB. Our approach offers a full Arcticcoverage time of 10s at apogee, and a refresh time of 5 minutesinstead of 100 or more for a sun-synchronous polar-orbitingimager. HDNIs can produce multispectral visible/near-IRimagery (RGB or true color) both day and night, withhigher-contrast, higher-resolution imagery (750m at apogee)than existing and planned IR sensors. The dynamic range ex-tends from the brightest clouds, ice, and snow to reflected moon-light from open water, thereby enabling surface discriminationeven under low light and very low thermal contrast conditions.Therefore, the system can provide unique information aboutthe dynamic Arctic environment, improving weather forecast-ing and routine monitoring of ice conditions, human activity,and natural disasters. Rapidly refreshed HDNI data wouldresult in frequent updates to key environmental products, suchas cloud and surface imagery, ice, and open water distribution,including real-time maps of where leads are opening and newice is forming, vector ice motion, and vector polar winds fromcloud motion.

Furthermore, the HDNI’s compact sensor design makes itideal for deployment as a hosted payload or as the primarypayload on a small satellite. The design, described in moredetail elsewhere,2 offers several advantages over scanning sen-sors currently used or planned for use in geosynchronous and

polar orbit, including significantly smaller size, lighter weight,better sensitivity, and more rapidly updated imagery. The large-format 2D detector arrays used in HDNIs enable a wide-field-of-view imager that could cover the entire Arctic in one frame, plusmost of the Northern Hemisphere as seen from the satellite.

We could implement HDNIs in a wide variety of highlyelliptical orbits. For example, we could deploy the imagers in aconstellation of two satellites in identical 12-hour HEO orbits,sharing the same orbital plane with a temporal offset of 6hours, as described in Trishchenko and Garand.3 This two-satellite HEO constellation would provide continuous coverageof the Arctic, because each satellite moves relatively slowly nearapogee (39,863km above Earth’s surface) enabling it to dwellover the Arctic for hours.

Furthermore, the imager should be able to detect human ac-tivity in the Arctic and elsewhere, based on demonstrated VIIRSDNB performance. For example, in Figure 1 it is easy to see citylights along the North Slope of Alaska. Likewise, in other VIIRSDNB frames, natural gas flares and lights from fishing boatsshow up clearly. This application of HDNI imagery may becomeincreasingly important over time, as development of the Arcticcontinues.

In summary, persistent satellite observations are essentialfor monitoring and understanding Earth’s environmentally

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sensitive and rapidly changing Arctic region. Compactwide-field-of-view imagers aboard satellites in HEO could bepositioned over the Arctic and collect multispectral, wide-dynamic-range visible and near-IR imagery with sensitivitysimilar to that of the VIIRS DNB in sun-synchronous polarorbit. These imagers provide high-contrast visible-wavelengthimagery even through the long polar night. Rapidly refreshedHDNI data would result in frequent updates, and the relativelysmall size of HDNIs makes them easy to deploy. We lookforward, in the future, to the possibility of building and flyingHDNIs as part of commercial or government systems.

Author Information

Jeffery PuschellRaytheonEl Segundo, CA

Jeffery Puschell is a principal engineering fellow and hasmore than 30 years of experience developing IR and visible-wavelength systems for research and operational applications inremote sensing and optical communication. He has authored orcoauthored more than 130 technical papers.

References

1. S. D. Miller, W. Straka, III, S. P. Mills, C. D. Elvidge, T. F. Lee, J. Sol-brig, A. Walther, A. K. Heidinger, and S. C. Weiss, Illuminating the capabilitiesof the Suomi NPP VIIRS Day/Night Band, Rem. Sens. 5, pp. 6717–6766, 2013.doi:10.3390/rs51267172. J. J. Puschell, D. Johnson, and S. Miller, Persistent observations of the Arctic fromhighly elliptical orbits using multispectral, wide field of view day-night imagers, Proc.SPIE 9223, p. 922304, 2014. doi:10.1117/12.20649123. A. P. Trishchenko and L. Garand, Spatial and temporal sampling of polar regionsfrom two-satellite system on Molniya orbit, J. Atmos. Ocean. Technol. 28, pp. 977–992,2011.

c� 2014 SPIE

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by Jeffery J Puschell

Environmental Monitoring

134 • METEOROLOGICAL TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL AUGUST 2013

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BETTER WEATHER AHEADA look at the future of global weather and climate forecastingWith Suomi NPP’s Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite, meteorologists are discovering a new tool for improving the accuracy of their predictions

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METEOROLOGICAL TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL AUGUST 2013 • 135

Environmental Satellite (POES) system, which traces its legacy back to TIROS, and the NASA Earth Observing System in orbit since the late 1990s. JPSS will operate as part of a constellation of polar-orbiting environmental satellites that also includes the current and next-generation EUMETSAT operational polar orbiting satellites and Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites.

A single instrument built by Raytheon, called the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), is the primary source for 22 of the 38 environmental data products to be delivered by JPSS, directly contributing to weather and climate forecasting and monitoring of sea surface temperature, ocean color, land use, biomass fires, aerosols and cloud-top properties.

This next-generation sensor provides highly accurate and precise measurements of light radiated by the Earth at visible through thermal infrared wavelengths. Incorporating a modular, flexible design architecture, VIIRS capability can be adapted to future mission needs for the next 20 to 30 years, implementing lessons learned and responding to new requirements based on the existing, proven design.

Improving upon legacy technologyBeginning with the first flight unit (F1) aboard Suomi NPP, and continuing with future JPSS spacecraft, VIIRS replaces and improves on four sensors: the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), the Raytheon-built keystone of NASA’s Earth Observing System, in flight

For more than 50 years, the Earth has been observed from space using instruments on board dedicated

environmental remote sensing satellites. These satellites have changed the world by providing continuous global observations that make it possible to anticipate severe weather events and provide more accurate routine weather forecasts, which in turn helps protect property, save lives and sustain economic productivity.

Since the first weather satellite, TIROS-1 (Television InfraRed Observation Satellite-1), launched in 1960, space-based sensing technology has improved from television cameras providing fuzzy images of cloud formations to visible-infrared spectroradiometers that provide highly detailed information about the Earth’s atmosphere and surface. Measurements made possible by an emerging generation of new technology instruments are vital to understanding the complex connections across the planet driving weather, biological productivity and climate conditions.

The NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite, launched in 2011, is the latest development in this 50 year-plus progression of systems that has revolutionized our perception and understanding of the Earth. Suomi NPP, named for Professor Verner Suomi of the University of Wisconsin, who flew the first space-based meteorological experiment in 1958, is the precursor to the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), the next-generation operational polar-orbiting US system. JPSS replaces NOAA’s Polar-orbiting Operational

An infrared false-color image taken on October 26, 2012 (below), emphasizes the high clouds and upper-level outflow near Tropical Sandy’s center, while the high spatial resolutions of the VIIRS instrument permits the analysis of gravity waves propagating out from the center, as well as the overshooting tops of deep convective towers that confirm the predicted intensification of then Tropical Storm Sandy into a hurricane. The second is a true color image captured on October 28, 2012 as the eye of the storm approaches landfall (Photos: NOAA/NASA)

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136 • METEOROLOGICAL TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL AUGUST 2013

calibrated day/night band, with 100 times more sensitivity than OLS, improves night-time weather forecasting.

Innovative designA key to the success of the VIIRS design is a rotating telescope assembly that can simultaneously meet a diverse set of requirements for multispectral imaging, spectroradiometry and low-light day/night observations. Advantages of the rotating telescope design relative to scan mirror-based systems include better control of stray light; smaller range in angle of incidence of light on the fore optics, to reduce image distortion; immunity to image rotation as the scan moves out from nadir; and better protection from contamination and degradation over time because all optical elements are deep inside the instrument housing.

The rotating telescope assembly is followed by a fixed telescope along with other back-end optics that image the scene and separate light onto three focal planes with filters that define each spectral band.

since 1999; the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), operating on board the NOAA Polar Operational Environmental satellites since 1978 and on the more recent EUMETSAT Meteorological Operational (MetOp) satellites; the operational line scanner (OLS), on board DMSP satellites since 1976; and the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), also built by Raytheon, which provided ocean color measurements with unprecedented fidelity for more than 13 years aboard the Orbview-2 satellite.

VIIRS offers major breakthroughs in environmental remote sensing performance. Its 22 spectral bands provide four times better spectral coverage than AVHRR, thereby enabling new agricultural, climate, disaster monitoring, public health and weather data products. VIIRS also offers at least three times better spatial resolution than AVHRR and MODIS at end-of-scan, giving sharper imagery over a much greater area. A wider imaging swath (3,000km) eliminates coverage gaps at the equator during a single day of observation. A fully

A cryoradiator radiates heat from the infrared detector arrays to deep space to maintain a stable detector operating temperature as low as 78K.

The focal plane interface electronics carry signals from the detector arrays to the externally mounted electronics module (EM). The EM synchronizes the rotating telescope assembly with a rotating flat mirror to make it possible to image the scene onto the detector arrays without image rotation. The EM also provides onboard processing of detector samples to enable a nearly constant pixel size across the entire scan, data compression, processing of operational data, and formatting of the data into the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems (CCSDS) format. The EM communicates via a databus with the spacecraft, to provide VIIRS operational data and telemetry, and to receive commands, spacecraft telemetry and software uploads. A fault-tolerant design enables long mission life.

VIIRS has an onboard calibration subsystem consisting of a carefully stabilized blackbody source to provide a reference signal for the emissive infrared bands, and a diffuser to provide a reference for bands dominated by reflected sunlight. VIIRS includes a monitor to detect any changes in the optical characteristics of the solar diffuser over time. The VIIRS calibration subsystem has a rich MODIS heritage – a key to maintaining continuity with data from the MODIS instruments onboard the NASA Earth Observing System Terra and Aqua satellites.

The two images on the opening page show two views of Hurricane Sandy. The first, on the left, is an infrared false-color image taken on October 26, 2012, emphasizes the high clouds and upper-level outflow near the storm’s center. The high spatial resolution of the VIIRS instrument permits the analysis of gravity waves propagating from the center, as well as the overshooting tops of deep convective towers that confirm the predicted intensification of the then tropical storm into a hurricane. The

Monitoring the Arctic during ‘polar darkness’ with the VIIRS day-night band. (Photo: NASA)

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METEOROLOGICAL TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL AUGUST 2013 • 137

VIIRS F1 and F2 instrument characteristics with image of F1 integrated onto the Suomi NPP spacecraft(Picture: Ball Aerospace)

VIIRS architecture, from photon collection to data generation

second figure (on the right) is a true-color image captured on October 28, 2012 as the eye of the storm approached landfall.

Results show the VIIRS sensor validates its fundamental design architecture by delivering environmental data products with unprecedented completeness.

Night visionOne advance that has received particular attention is the VIIRS day-night band (DNB), a wide dynamic range, panchromatic spectral band that collects useful visible wavelength imagery with illumination ranging from full sunlight down to air glow and aurorae. It is sensitive enough to pick up light from single ships at sea at night.

Meteorologists in Alaska are finding VIIRS DNB imagery to be an important new tool for operational weather forecasting. The DNB is remarkably useful for characterizing clouds, detecting snow, ice and fog, and tracking hazardous weather patterns during the long Alaskan winter, when visible wavelength imagery from other systems is severely limited. Likewise, weather forecasters in the contiguous USA and elsewhere are finding that VIIRS DNB data enables clear views of weather events throughout the night, improving prediction accuracy.

As VIIRS F1 continues to perform well on board Suomi NPP, providing high-quality visible/infrared imaging spectroradiometry with unprecedented clarity and completeness, F2 is being built at Raytheon’s facility in El Segundo, California. The sensor is on track for delivery in 2014 and a scheduled launch on board the first JPSS satellite in 2017.

As AVHRR and MODIS take their place in the history of space-based environmental remote sensing, VIIRS will continue to expand the record of environmental data that scientists use to understand the Earth, enhance weather forecasting and track climate conditions for future generations. z

Jeffery J Puschell is the principal engineering fellow at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, based in the USA

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2015 Astro ImmersionReading MaterialsIV.

G. Articles for Professor Angela V. Olinto: Extreme Universe Space Observatory at the Japanese Module

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This summer in Timmins, Ontario, scientists testedthe prototype of a new cosmic-ray telescope.

Stephen Rountree

Space » Scientific American Volume 311, Issue 5 » Advances

Permanent Address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-ray-telescope-flies-high/

Cosmic-Ray Telescope Flies HighThe new detector passes tests involving a helicopter, balloon and lasers

Oct 14, 2014 | By Debra Weiner |

Cosmic rays, traveling nearly at the speed of light, bombard Earth from alldirections. The electrically charged particles are the most energetic component ofcosmic radiation—yet no one knows where they come from.

Astrophysicists speculate that high-energy cosmic rays may have emerged fromsupermassive black holes in faraway galaxies or possibly from decaying particlesfrom the big bang.

Whatever their origin, these rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere about once persquare kilometer per century. The impact produces an air shower of tens of billionsof secondary, lower-energy particles that in turn excite nitrogen molecules in theatmosphere. The interactions produce ultraviolet fluorescence that lights up the airshower’s path. Scientists are trying to use such paths to measure the direction andenergy of cosmic rays and reconstruct their trajectories back millions of light-yearsinto space to pinpoint their source.

Seeing these extreme events is rare. Earth-based observatories can spot cosmic- raycollisions only if they occur directly above the detectors. The Pierre AugerObservatory in Argentina, which houses the world’s largest cosmic-ray detector andcovers an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, records about 20 extreme-energyparticle showers a year.

Hoping to improve the odds of observing the rays, a team of scientists from 15nations came together more than a decade ago and designed a cosmic- ray telescopefor the International Space Station (ISS). On the Japanese Experimental Module, theExtreme Universe Space Observatory (JEM- EUSO) will record ultraviolet emissionswith a wide-angle, high-speed video camera that points toward Earth. With such alarge observation area, the camera will see more air showers. The team originallyhoped to launch EUSO in 2006. But troubles on Earth—first the space shuttleColumbia disaster in 2003, then the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011 and nowthe turmoil in Ukraine—have delayed its deployment until at least 2018.

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YES!YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific

American with no obligation to continue

the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed

for the one-year subscription.

Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc., used with permission

© 2015 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.

ADVERTISEMENTThe science, however, marches onward. In August the team launched a prototype ofthe telescope 38 kilometers into the stratosphere onboard a helium- filled balloon.For two hours, researchers followed below in a helicopter, shooting a pulsed UV laserand LED into the telescope’s field of view. The test was a success: the prototype detected the UV traces, which are similar to thefluorescence generated by extreme energy cosmic-ray air showers. In 2016 astronauts will transport a shoebox-size prototype calledMini-EUSO to the ISS and see how it fares at the altitude of the full mission.

This article was originally published with the title "Catching Some Rays."

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Notes

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Notes

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Notes

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Notes

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Notes

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