How Was The Universe Formed

UMass telescope plumbs deep space

NORTHAMPTON - It's been a long journey to the top of the astronomy world for Peter Schloerb - or in this case, a very tall volcano in Mexico.

The longtime University of Massachusetts Amherst astronomer began thinking about designing a giant telescope more than two decades ago. He envisioned a millimeter-wave radio telescope that, if successful, would help scientists uncover secrets about the creation of the universe by probing space's distant galaxies.

That vision is now reality. After years of starts and stops centered around funding, politics and construction, Schloerb and a team of other astronomers from UMass and Mexico flipped the switches this spring on the so-called Large Millimeter Telescope. A short time later, the telescope collected its first light spectrum from a distant galaxy.

In the grand scheme of the universe, 20 years is obviously a drop in the bucket. But for Schloerb, the telescope has been a long time coming.

"It's great to go down there and go up to the site, turn on the equipment and see those signals ... we are real excited about this," said Schloerb, who splits his time between the Amherst campus and Mexico.

The $140 million telescope is the largest joint U.S.-Mexican venture ever, and is the largest scientific endeavor in Mexico's history. Mexico's scientific community and former president Vicente Fox long championed the telescope as a way to show how a developing country can play a major role in cutting-edge technology.

The telescope, which looks like a large satellite dish, sits atop Sierra Negra, a 15,000-foot extinct volcano in the central Mexican state of Puebla.

Sierra Negra is one of six Mexican volcanos that are higher than any peaks in the continental United States. That's important because the telescope has to be high enough to escape the water vapor layer in Earth's atmosphere that blocks the millimeter-wave light that scientists want to collect from distant objects in space.

When fully operational, the 50-meter telescope is designed to be the largest, most sensitive single-aperture instrument of its kind in the world. Right now, the telescope is outfitted so the inner 32-meter diameter is being used as a collecting area. It will be completed to its full size - a little more than half the length of a football field - by the Mexican government.

The telescope is capable of receiving millimeter-long radio waves that have been traveling through space for nearly 13.7 billion years, back when the universe was formed.

How Was Our Solar System Formed? « Aliflameem

Astronomy may be hard science, but there’s always been a whiff of Disney about it too. What else beyond enchantment could explain the ice volcanoes onNeptune’s moon Triton, the helium rain in the atmosphere of Jupiter, the beads of colored glass scattered across the surface of the moon? Now you can add one more through-the-looking-glass feature to the fantasyland that is the cosmos: the green crystal rain falling on a young star in the constellation Orion.

When most people think of what makes up a star, little more than gas and fire come to mind — and that’s not a bad start. It’s hard for much else to survive in so superhot a mass. But a star’s reach is a lot bigger than we think, blasting flares and plumes high into space — and out there, things get a lot colder.

Since 2003, the Spitzer Space Telescope has been studying the universe in the infrared spectrum — looking, essentially, at how different phenomena play out at different temperatures — and the upper reaches of stars has been one of its areas of investigation. Several years ago, the telescope turned its giant eye toward a star called HOPS-68, which is located in Orion about 1,350 light years from Earth. The data it gathered, like much of the information all space telescopes collect, was initially recorded and banked, awaiting the time astronomers could break it down and analyze it. That analysis was just completed and the findings were published in the newest edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters. The conclusions the scientists reached were clearly worth the wait.

What Spitzer observed was a sort of perpetual crystalline rainstorm made of a bright green mineral of a class called olivine, pouring down on the infant star. Olivine is a magnesium iron silicate that exists throughout the universe — in distant galaxies and local comets — as well as in earthly jewelry stores, in a pristine, gem-quality form called peridot.

Various kinds of olivine were also collected on the moon throughout the Apollo program. Lunar olivine was created by great volcanoes called fire fountains, which sprayed superheated lava into the sky. As the aerosolized material settled back down to the surface and cooled, it formed glass beads. It was the crew of Apollo 15 who first found green olivine — specifically, a magnesium-rich variety that goes by the name forsterite, which is also the kind that was spotted by Spitzer.

The existence of forsterite in a star like HOPS-68 is not entirely without precedent; the crystals have been found in the vicinity of young stars before, but never so high up — and never behaving like rain before. While the material is created by a process of cooling, it must first be superheated, and the temperature at the above-star altitude at which Spitzer detected the green beads is just too cold — it’s -280°F (-170°C) — for the silicate to form properly. But that’s not a problem if the forsterite wasn’t created there at all.

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