Sunday, February 5, 2023

3860 - PLANETS - the search is on?

 

     -  3860  -  PLANETS  -  the search is on?     There is a whole new era of telescopes, in space and on the ground, set to revolutionize astronomy.   From black holes to the search for life and beyond, all of astronomy's greatest mysteries are under assault. Astronomers are  using tools that range from the biggest space telescopes to arrays of tiny radio telescopes scattered across a desert on Earth.

           


            ------------------  3860  -   PLANETS  -  the search is on?

            -    Starting from the smaller scale, future astronomical facilities will bring about the first detection of life on another planet in the coming years. Exoplanet astronomers are searching for planets around other stars that host conditions in which life can likely thrive.

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            -    Recognizing life and understanding a planet's conditions are really complicated tasks, though. Not only do we need to look for the actual signs of life, known as biosignatures, but we also need to understand the context in which we spot those signs, the planet's environment, even including the behavior of the star it orbits.

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            -    Looking ahead, the major “Habitable Worlds Observatory” (HWO), planned for the 2030s, will be able to peer deeper into these planets' atmospheres and give us an even better shot of finding life. Whereas JWST mainly uses transits, a planet crossing in front of its star, to observe Earth-size exoplanets, the Habitable Worlds Observatory will take a more direct approach, imaging the planets themselves, even down to Earth-like sizes.

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            -     Observatories here on Earth also promise new insights into the search for life. A new class of observatories known as "Extremely Large Telescopes" or ELTs are under construction in Hawaii and Chile. These mammoth projects will have mirrors around 98 feet (30 meters) in diameter, which is three times larger than any other optical telescope in existence.

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            -    Although JWST, the HWO and other space-based observatories are powerful tools, they come with hefty price tags, so astronomers will rely on complementary ground-based telescopes like they always have, however, now those ground-based telescopes will be much more powerful.

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            -    The coming decades also promise new ways of seeing, or rather, hearing the universe, including the ability to detect more types of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. "LIGO” [the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory] is currently the only gravitational wave detector to have made a direct observation of gravitational waves. However, LIGO is only looking at a small fraction of the whole spectrum of gravitational waves, there are plenty of signals it's not able to observe.

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            -    For these other gravitational waves, distinguished by their lower frequencies and longer-lasting signals, astronomers will need to wait for the space-based detector known as “LISA”, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.  Like a massive LIGO detector, LISA will keep three satellites in a huge and perfect triangle as they all orbit the Earth together. 

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            -     Astronomers will use another technique known as “pulsar timing”. Pulsars are spinning dead cores of large stars that each shoot two beams of light into space like a cosmic lighthouse. Pulsars are often used to time events in the cosmos because they're so predictable that their time-keeping would only be off by 100 nanoseconds over an entire decade.

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            -    As gravitational waves pass through pulsars, astronomers can spot the tiny changes in the pulsar's regular rhythm. This method promises to reveal colliding pairs of black holes in which each partner is around a billion times the mass of our sun.

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            -   Tens of radio telescopes across the globe, from the Deep Synoptic Array in California to the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa and beyond, are undergoing upgrades and working together to gather the data needed for pulsar timing to reveal the impact of gravitational waves from supermassive black holes.

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            -   These projects are only a fraction of the ideas astronomers have for the future of space exploration. But whatever the technology, from ELTs to mega-sized space telescopes and beyond, scientists hope they will help answer our most fundamental questions: where did we come from, and are we alone? It's a historic time for astronomy, and for humankind as a whole.

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            February 4, 2023        PLANETS  -  the search is on?                  3860                                                                                                                           

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            --------------------- ---  Sunday, February 5, 2023  ---------------------------

             

             

             

             

                     

             

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