A Film Of The Heavens

STELLAR CHEMISTRY

The PS1 telescope on Haleakala, Maui.

by Staff Writers
Heidelberg, Germany (SPX) Oct 13, 2006
Astronomers from the Max-Planck-Institutes for Astronomy in Heidelberg and for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching have joined with colleagues world-wide to form a consortium that will exploit a powerful new survey telescope on Haleakala on the island of Maui (Hawaii). This telescope will map repeatedly much of the entire sky, hence creating a high color-map and the first digital "movie" of the heavens, mapping changes in the sky with time.

The PanSTARRS1 Consortium will use data from the University of Hawaii's 1.8 metre PS1 telescope to discover billions of new stars, new planets, galaxies and solar system objects, including potential "killer asteroids" that threaten the Earth. It will also produce the most extensive 3-dimensional map of the Universe ever made.

The consortium that will assemble and interpret these maps includes the two institutes of the Max Planck Society in Germany, the University of Hawaii, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Johns Hopkins University in the USA, plus a group of Universities in the United Kingdom. Together, the consortium will contribute the hardware, software for the telescope and data pipeline, and the cost of operating the survey in Hawaii for 3.5 years.

The telescope, which has a 71-inch diameter mirror, achieved "First Light" in June this year. It is currently undergoing engineering tests and will become fully operational in 2007. It will soon be equipped with the world's largest digital camera, under construction at the UH Institute for Astronomy's Manoa headquarters.

The camera will have 1.4 billion pixels - about 300 times as many as a typical commercial digital camera, and its field of view will be 7 square degrees large. This extremely large field of view, high sensitivity of the detectors and overall optical quality of the system will allow repeated fast coverage of the entire sky observable from Hawaii.

As a consequence of this breakthrough in the size of the field of view and digital detector, an enormous data flow of several terabytes per night will be collected; therefore new solutions for data handling, evaluation and storage have to be developed.

The resulting images, once put together as a map and monitoring "movie" of the sky provide a treasure trove of information and a long-lasting legacy archive for a wide range of astrophysical research, which will become available to the world-wide community after completion of the project.

Based on these data, researchers at the two Max Planck Institutes will lead a number of central key science projects:

The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg will lead the search for extra-solar planets. The PS1 survey, with its repeated imaging of the same parts of the sky, i.e. its movie mode, could lead to the discovery of 100 planets like Jupiter using the transit method, in which the central star is briefly obscured by the dark planet transiting in front of it.

The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy will also lead the construction of an unprecedented 3-dimensional map of our own Milky Way and its surrounding, so as to better understand how our "galactic home" came into existence the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics will lead a research project on the nature of Dark Energy using the evolution of the large-scale distribution of massive galaxies. Dark Energy accelerates the expansion of the universe and its origin is possibly the most fundamental problem of modern physics.

Finally, the database generated by the entire PanSTARRS1 survey will provide a large variety of input objects for follow-up studies more powerful telescopes, like the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile or the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona.

STELLAR CHEMISTRY

Celestial Siblings Offer Evidence Of Stellar Formation Long Ago

Urbana-Champaign IL (SPX) Oct 12, 2006
The death of a massive nearby star billions of years ago offers evidence the sun was born in a star cluster, say astronomers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rather than being an only child, the sun could have hundreds or thousands of celestial siblings, now dispersed across the heavens.

SUPERPOWERS Asian Poll Foresees US Losing Superpower Status To China Bring Back The Tsar Big Powers To Hold Crucial Meeting On Iran With UN Sanctions In View Russia To Provide Significant Military Aid To Allies Says Ivanov	NUKEWARS Bush Waves Sticks And Carrots At North Korea In Nuclear Standoff North Korea Plays Down Nuclear Test At Home Only A Matter Of Time Before North Korea Could Attack Say Japanese Analysts Ahmadinejad Says Iran Will Develop Full Nuclear Fuel Cycle
MISSILE NEWS Raytheon Awarded US Army Contract For Wireless Precision Assault Missiles Ukraine Seeks Missile Alliance With Israel BAE Systems Inertial Measurement Unit Selected For New Air-to-air Missile South Korea Develops Cruise Missile	MISSILE DEFENSE No Missile Defense Deployment Offer From US Yet Says Poland O'Reilly Flies High At Missile Defense Agency North Korean Test A Spur To US Missile Defense Program Japan Give Ballistic Missile Defence A Boost For Bush
AEROSPACE German-Chinese Aviation Opens New Horizons For Cooperation GAO Report On Progress Of Implementing Aerospace Recommendations US Air-Transportation System Must Become More Agile Airbus Sinks Into Chaos	UAV NEWS Boeing Manned/Unmanned Light Helicopter Makes First Flight Boeing X-45A To Be Inducted Into Smithsonian And USAF National Museum Live Firing on Dragonfly Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Intelligent Unmanned Aircraft Planned
IRAQ WARS Updated Iraq Survey Affirms Earlier Mortality Estimates Assessing The New Iraqi Army In Late 2006 US Commander In Iraq Says No More Troops Needed Now Winds Of Change In Iraq	MILTECH Raytheon Delivers First Excalibur Production Rounds To The US Army Scientists Look to Help Soldiers Overcome High Altitude F-22 Raptor Ready For Its Combat Role New Radar Flies High As Crucial Tests Begin

The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2006 - SpaceDaily.AFP and UPI Wire Stories are copyright Agence France-Presse and United Press International. ESA PortalReports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additionalcopyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by SpaceDaily on any Web page published or hosted by SpaceDaily. Privacy Statement