ESO VLT: Hosting unique intergalactic GPS instrument to map the stars

Artist's impression of the MOONS instrument. Credit: STFC

A €9M contract is announced today for Scottish engineers and designers to build a unique and powerful instrument that aims to tackle some of the most compelling astronomical puzzles, such as how stars and galaxies form and evolve, and probing the structure of our own Milky Way.

A project team from the Astronomy Technology Centre (ATC) in Edinburgh will lead this international project to develop and build MOONS for the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile, already the world's most productive ground-based astronomical facility.

MOONS (Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph) will allow astronomers to see obscured areas in the Milky Way at a distance of around 40,000 light years away, and enable them to create a 3D map of our galaxy.

This is difficult to do as the Earth is in the middle of the Milky Way's disc, so the process is like trying to map a forest of densely-packed trees from the inside.

Director of the ATC, Professor Gillian Wright, said "The team at ATC in Scotland have an opportunity with this project to enable all of us to understand why the Milky Way looks the way it does."

"This instrument will act as an intergalactic GPS to help us to navigate through the billions of stars in our galaxy and create a comprehensive map of its structure."

Conceived at the ATC, part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), MOONS is scheduled to become operational by 2019.

Building such an ambitious and powerful new device, which will be about the size of a transit van, will take around 200 staff-years of effort, with the hardware alone costing €9M.

The full project will cost around €23M. The ATC will lead the Project Office managing the multinational consortium that will construct MOONS, and will also play a vital design role for key components and ensure the project's benefits extend throughout UK industry.

ESO's VLT platform. (Credit: ESO)

Like any spectrograph, MOONS will use the colour of light emitted by objects to reveal their chemical composition, mass, speed and other properties.

Breaking new ground by simultaneously observing 1000 objects using fibre-optic cables to feed their visible and infrared light into the instrument, it will survey large samples of objects far faster than any existing instrument and conduct surveys that would be virtually impossible using today's technologies.

Not surprisingly, the design will pose extraordinary technical demands. For example, each of the 1000-plus fibres will have to move into position very quickly, with great accuracy and without colliding with each other.

The ATC will develop the most innovative component, the individual motorised systems allowing each fibre to move rapidly into position; it will also develop the cryostat system (used to cool MOONS down to -170°C) vital to enabling the infrared observations needed to penetrate galactic and intergalactic dust clouds.

The University of Cambridge will take the credit for developing complex cameras capable of meeting the instrument's demanding performance requirements.

Partnerships with a range of UK equipment suppliers will also contribute across the project, helping the UK to further strengthen its cutting-edge scientific capabilities in the relevant fields.

Hasselblad 500EL Unique camera from NASA's moon missions sold at auction

A Hasselblad 500EL "Data Camera HEDC Nasa" Jim Irwin Lunar Module Pilot camera, dated from 1968, used on the moon during Apollo lunar programs is sold at an auction for 550,000 euros ($760,000) at the Westlicht Gallery in Vienna on March 21, 2014

The Hasselblad 500EL is the only camera to return from NASA's moon missions in 1969-1972.

It was sold at an auction in Vienna Saturday for 550,000 euros ($760,000), far outdoing its estimated price.

The boxy silver-coloured camera, which was sold to a telephone bidder, was initially valued at 150,000-200,000 euros.

The Hasselblad model was one of 14 cameras sent to the moon as part of NASA's Apollo 11-17 missions but was the only one to be brought back.

As a rule, the cameras, which weighed several kilos and could be attached to the front of a space suit, were abandoned to allow the astronauts to bring back moon rock, weight being a prime concern on the missions.

"It has moon dust on it... I don't think any other camera has that," Peter Coeln, owner of the Westlicht gallery which organised the auction, said of the rare piece.

The camera, which was being sold by a private collector, was used by astronaut Jim Irwin to take 299 pictures during the Apollo 15 mission in July-August 1971.

A small plate inside is engraved with the number 38, the same number that appears on Irwin's NASA snapshots.

Close to 600 objects were on sale on Saturday at the Westlicht gallery, which is the world's largest auction house for cameras.

It has overseen the sale of some of the most expensive photographic equipment in history, including a 1923 Leica camera prototype that sold for 2.16 million euros, a world record.

Astronomers witness mysterious and unique disintegration of asteroid

This series of Hubble Space Telescope images reveals the breakup of an asteroid over a period of several months in late 2013. 

The largest fragments are up to 200 yards in radius, each with "tails" caused by dust lifted from their surfaces and pushed back by the pressure of sunlight. 

The 10 pieces of the asteroid drift apart slowly and show a range of breakup times, suggesting that the disintegration cannot be explained by a collision with another asteroid. 

One idea for the breakup is that the asteroid was accelerated by sunlight to spin at a fast enough rate to fly apart by centrifugal force. 

The images were taken in visible light with Hubble's Wide-Field Camera 3. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt/UCLA

Astronomers have witnessed for the first time the breakup of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces.

The discovery is published online March 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Though fragile comet nuclei have been seen falling apart as they near the sun, nothing resembling this type of breakup has been observed before in the asteroid belt. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope photographed the demolition.

"Seeing this rock fall apart before our eyes is pretty amazing," said David Jewitt, a professor in the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences and the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, who led the astronomical forensics investigation.

The crumbling asteroid, designated P/2013 R3, was first noticed as an anomalous, fuzzy-looking object on Sept. 15, 2013, by the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky-survey telescopes.

Pan-STARRS sky-survey telescope

A follow-up observation on Oct. 1 with the W.M. Keck telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea revealed three co-moving bodies embedded in a dusty envelope that is nearly the diameter of Earth.

"The Keck telescope showed us that this asteroid was worth looking at with Hubble," Jewitt said.

With its superior resolution, the Hubble telescope revealed that there were really 10 embedded objects, each with comet-like dust tails.

The four largest rocky fragments are up to 200 yards in radius, about twice the length of a football field.

The Hubble data showed that the fragments are drifting away from each other at a leisurely pace of one mile per hour—slower than a strolling human.

The asteroid began coming apart early last year, but new pieces continue to emerge in the most recent images.

This makes it unlikely that the asteroid is disintegrating because of a collision with another asteroid, which would be instantaneous and violent.

Some of the debris from such a high-velocity smash-up would also be expected to travel much faster than observed.

GBT NRAO: Pulsar in stellar triple system makes unique gravitational laboratory

The pulsar (L) is orbited by a hot white dwarf star (C) both of which are orbited by a cooler, distant white dwarf (R)

Credit: NRAO

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a unique stellar system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense neutron star, all packed within a space smaller than Earth's orbit around the Sun.

The results appear in Nature journal and will be presented at the 223rd American Astronomical Society meeting.

The closeness of the stars, combined with their nature, has allowed the scientists to make the best measurements yet of the complex gravitational interactions in such a system.

In addition, detailed studies of this system may provide a key clue for resolving one of the principal outstanding problems of fundamental physics—the true nature of gravity.

"This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that physicists expect to see under extreme conditions," said Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

West Virginia University graduate student Jason Boyles (now at Western Kentucky University) originally uncovered the pulsar as part of a large-scale search for pulsars with the GBT.

Pulsars are neutron stars that emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves that rapidly sweep through space as the object spins on its axis.

GALEX satellite

One of the search's discoveries was a pulsar some 4200 light-years from Earth, spinning nearly 366 times per second.

Such rapidly-spinning pulsars are called millisecond pulsars, and can be used by astronomers as precision tools for studying a variety of phenomena, including searches for the elusive gravitational waves.

Subsequent observations showed that the pulsar is in a close orbit with a white dwarf star, and that pair is in orbit with another, more-distant white dwarf.

WIYN NRAO Telescope

"This is the first millisecond pulsar found in such a system, and we immediately recognized that it provides us a tremendous opportunity to study the effects and nature of gravity," Ransom said.

The scientists began an intensive observational program using the GBT, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands.

They also studied the system using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the GALEX satellite, the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

"The gravitational perturbations imposed on each member of this system by the others are incredibly pure and strong," Ransom said.

"The millisecond pulsar serves as an extremely powerful tool for measuring those perturbations incredibly well," he added.

More information: Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature12917

Glaucoma's unique protein expression could enhance diagnosis and treatment

An eye under pressure appears to express a unique set of proteins that physicians hope will one day help them better diagnose and treat glaucoma.

Glaucoma, the second leading cause of blindness worldwide, tends to progress silently until decreased vision indicates trouble, said Dr. Kathryn Bollinger, Medical College of Georgia clinician-scientist specializing in glaucoma.

But inside fluid-filled eyeballs, a changing protein profile -- 30 with significant increases and 17 with significant decreases identified among hundreds of proteins present -- appears to also give a heads-up, Bollinger reported during the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology Annual Meeting April 30-May 6. The MCG ophthalmologist received the 2010 ARVO/Alcon Early Career Clinician-Scientist Research Award for the study.

With glaucoma, elevated pressures inside the eyeball stress the optic nerve and nerve arms -- called axons ? that reach out to communicate with the brain. Over time, increased pressure can kill nerve cells and axons and decrease vision. "At this point, we don't have a regenerative strategy," Bollinger said.

The pressure results from an imbalance in fluid production and loss. In a healthy eye, the fluid, called the aqueous humor, moves continually from the back to the front of the eye where it exits ? mostly via a natural tract between the iris and cornea ? first into spongy tissue near the cornea's base called the trabecular meshwork then into the venous system and back into the body.

In open-angle glaucoma, the most common type in this country, the tract remains open but fluid still backs up and scientists suspect changes in the permeability of the trabecular meshwork may be to blame. Topical glaucoma treatments work by reducing fluid production or increasing outflow through a secondary drainage system, also near the front of the eye. Ophthalmologists such as Bollinger can also create a new pathway surgically if needed.

To get a better picture of what happens to the trabecular meshwork, Bollinger examined tissues from the outflow tracts and trabecular meshwork of patients with and without glaucoma. She added TGF-?, a protein and inflammatory element known as a cytokine that is consistently found at high levels in patients with open-angle glaucoma. After comparing treated and untreated tissue, she found that TGF-? resulted in a similarly unique protein pattern. Current therapies don't target TGF-? or its effects in the trabecular meshwork.

Next steps include identifying additional proteins expressed in glaucoma, determining the impact of the unique protein profile on the trabecular meshwork and clarifyingTGF-?'s normal role inside the eye, Bollinger said.

Risk factors for glaucoma include age, a family history and black and Asian ethnicity.


Link: http://www.mcg.edu