Search
Menu
Excelitas Technologies Corp. - X-Cite Vitae LB 11/24

South Pole Telescope Team to Tackle Cosmic Questions

Facebook X LinkedIn Email
ARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 28, 2007 -- Just days before nations around the world were set to begin a coordinated global research campaign called the International Polar Year (IPY), scientists at the South Pole aimed a massive new telescope at Jupiter and successfully collected the instrument's first test observations.

Soon, a far more distant quarry will enter the South Pole telescope's (SPT) sights, as a team of researchers from nine institutions tackles fundamental mysteries of modern cosmology and the nature of the universe: What, for example, is dark energy, the force that dominates the universe?

southpoletel.jpgThe $19.2 million telescope is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with additional support from the Kavli Foundation of Oxnard, Calif., and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco.

"The telescope, camera and optics are all working as designed," said John Carlstrom, the S. Chandrasekhar distinguished service professor in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who heads the SPT team that tested the scope on Feb. 26. "SPT's first light is a major milestone for the project and a fitting conclusion to a remarkably productive summer at the South Pole station. We now look forward to fully characterizing the instrument and beginning cosmological observations."

"First light" is the scientific term for the time when a telescope becomes operational.

The telescope stands 75 feet (22.8 meters) tall, measures 33 feet (10 meters) across and weighs 280 tons (254 metric tons). It was assembled in Kilgore, Texas, then taken apart, shipped across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand, and flown from there to the South Pole. Since November, the SPT team under the guidance of project manager Steve Padin has worked furiously to reassemble and deploy the telescope.

As with any construction project at the Earth southern extremity, SPT was supported by a long and complex logistical chain stretching around the globe. All cargo to the South Pole is delivered by ski-equipped LC-130 aircraft, and the components must be able to be broken down to fit into the aircraft cargo bay. Flown by the New York Air National Guard, the aircraft are elements of Operation Deep Freeze, the military support arm of the US Antarctic Program, which also includes Air Force cargo jets and US Coast Guard icebreakers, Navy cargo handlers and many other logistical and personnel assets.

Raytheon Polar Services Co, of Centennial, Colo. is NSF's logistics contractor in Antarctica. RPSC personnel had a variety of essential roles in the successful completion of the SPT project, NSF officials said.

Astrophysicists know that the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago. In the late 1990s, astronomers using exploding stars as cosmic tape measures discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This led them to the idea that dark energy pushes the universe apart, overwhelming gravity, the attractive force exerted by all matter in the universe.

"We would like to know what makes the universe evolve," said Stephan Meyer, professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

SPT's first views occurred almost exactly 50 years after a team of 18 men spent the first winter in history at the South Pole as part of the 1956-57 International Geophysical Year (IGY). They occurred just days before nations around the globe launched the International Polar Year 2007-08, the first such global research campaign since IGY. The US opening ceremony for IPY was held today at the National Academies of Sciences in Washington DC.

Under the joint leadership of scientists Paul Siple and Navy Lt. John Tuck, 18 men were first to spend the winter at the pole in a station the US Navy built in the austral summer of 1956-57, using cargo dropped by US Air Force planes. Siple, Tuck and the 16 other "winterovers" were also the first people in history to witness sunset and sunrise at the South Pole, events that are separated in Antarctica by six months of darkness and frigid cold.

On Sept. 18, 1957, in the depths of the austral winter, temperature at the station dropped to -107 °F (-77.2 °C), the coldest temperature recorded on Earth at the time.

"We were like men who had been fired off in rockets to take up life on another planet. We were in a lifeless and almost featureless world. However snug and comfortable we might make ourselves, we could not escape from our isolation," wrote Siple in his memoir, Living at the Pole. "We were now face-to-face with raw nature so grim and stark, that our lives could be snuffed out in a matter of minutes. Every day would bring us new problems to solve and our ingenuity would be taxed over and over again. And all this to carry out a somewhat difficult fragment of the worldwide scientific program of the International Geophysical Year."

Opto Diode Corp. - Detector Spotlight 10-24 MR

The men laid the foundation for the scientific legacy that continues into the 21st century, as NSF completes construction of the third permanent station at the South Pole.

Astronomers work at the South Pole to take advantage of excellent viewing conditions. Cold, dry Antarctica will allow SPT to more easily detect the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the afterglow of the big bang, with minimal interference from water vapor. On the electromagnetic spectrum, the CMB falls somewhere between heat radiation and radio waves.

The CMB is largely uniform, but it contains tiny ripples of varying density and temperature. These ripples reflect the seeds that, through gravitational attraction, grew into the galaxies and galaxy clusters visible to astronomers today. The SPT's first key science project will be to study small variations in the CMB to determine if dark energy began to affect the formation of galaxy clusters by fighting against gravity over the past few billion years.

Galaxy clusters are groups of galaxies, the largest celestial bodies that gravity can hold together.

"Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is in one of these clusters," Meyer said. "And these clusters of galaxies actually change with time."

The CMB allows astronomers to take snapshots of the infant universe, when it was only 400,000 years old. No stars or galaxies had yet formed. If dark energy changed the way the universe expanded, it would have left its "fingerprints" in the way it forced galaxies apart over the deep history of time. Different causes would produce a different pattern in the formation of galaxy clusters.

According to one idea, dark energy could be Albert Einstein's cosmological constant: a steady force of nature operating at all times and in all places. Einstein introduced the cosmological constant into his theory of general relativity to accommodate a stationary universe, the dominant idea of the day. If Einstein's idea is correct, scientists will find that dark energy was much less influential in the universe 5 billion years ago than it is today.

"Clusters weren't around in the early universe. They took a long time to evolve," Carlstrom said.

Another version of the dark energy theory, called quintessence, suggests a force that varies in time and space. Some scientists even suggest there is no dark energy at all, and that gravity merely breaks down on vast intergalactic scales.

To pinpoint when dark energy became important, SPT will use a phenomenon called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, which distorts the CMB as it passes through the hot gas of intervening galaxy clusters. As the microwaves interact with gas in the clusters, some of the microwaves get kicked into a higher frequency. SPT will measure the slight temperature difference associated with the frequency change and produce an image of the gas in the cluster.

SPT can scan large regions of the sky quickly. Scientists expect it to detect thousands, or even tens of thousands, of galaxy clusters within a few years.

"To get a meaningful constraint on dark energy through measuring galaxy clusters, you need something like this South Pole Telescope," Carlstrom said. "The cluster SZ [Sunyaev-Zeldovich] signals cover small patches in the sky relative to the intrinsic variations in the cosmic microwave background. To get the necessary resolution, you need a big telescope. Now we have one."

Senior members of the SPT team include William Holzapfel, Adrian Lee and Helmuth Spieler from the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laborator; Joe Mohr, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; John Ruhl from Case Western Reserve University; Antony Stark, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory; Matt Dobbs from McGill University; and Erik Leitch of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For more information, visit: www.nsf.gov/mynsf

Published: February 2007
Glossary
astronomy
The scientific observation of celestial radiation that has reached the vicinity of Earth, and the interpretation of these observations to determine the characteristics of the extraterrestrial bodies and phenomena that have emitted the radiation.
nano
An SI prefix meaning one billionth (10-9). Nano can also be used to indicate the study of atoms, molecules and other structures and particles on the nanometer scale. Nano-optics (also referred to as nanophotonics), for example, is the study of how light and light-matter interactions behave on the nanometer scale. See nanophotonics.
photonics
The technology of generating and harnessing light and other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon. The science includes light emission, transmission, deflection, amplification and detection by optical components and instruments, lasers and other light sources, fiber optics, electro-optical instrumentation, related hardware and electronics, and sophisticated systems. The range of applications of photonics extends from energy generation to detection to communications and...
telescope
An afocal optical device made up of lenses or mirrors, usually with a magnification greater than unity, that renders distant objects more distinct, by enlarging their images on the retina.
astronomyBasic Sciencedark energydefenseInternational Polar YearIPYnanoNational Science FoundationNews & FeaturesNSFphotonicsSouth PoleSouth Pole telescopeSPTtelescope

We use cookies to improve user experience and analyze our website traffic as stated in our Privacy Policy. By using this website, you agree to the use of cookies unless you have disabled them.