NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, also known as SOFIA. (Photo: NASA)

The new SOFIA observatory isn't your average NASA project. Engineers took a 30-year old 747 airplane, cut a hole in the side and installed a 17-ton telescope. Most telescopes are either on the ground or somewhere in orbit, but SOFIA falls somewhere in the middle, flying around at about 40,000 feet.

I got the chance to hitch a ride on one of its recent research flights as the plane left Moffett Field at the NASA Ames Research Center. It's definitely not the kind of flight where you get a bag of peanuts and movie.

The researchers take advantage of the nighttime sky, so we left at dusk for 10-hour tour flying zigzags across the Pacific Ocean. Each leg of the journey is carefully calculated so the telescope can pinpoint a far away star. The plane interior is packed with computers and equipment. It also lacks insulation since much of it was removed to install the telescope, so it's both cold and loud inside.

At four in the morning, the astronomers are still hard at work. If they're as tired as I am, they certainly aren't showing it.

"For me, this is very exciting," says Ian McLean, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. He usually works on the ground. "All my career has been ground-based astronomy. So, it's only my second flight."

McLean says there's a good reason to do astronomy in the stratosphere. The atmosphere is thinner, which means it's easier for the telescope to see the stars. "It's almost as good as space," says McLean. "Not quite, but almost."

And unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, this telescope lands everyday, which means the scientists can update and fix the equipment. "By the time you get a mission into orbit, the technology you're using is relatively old. Here we can stay state of the art all the time," says McLean. NASA began developing SOFIA in 1997 and almost cancelled the project at one point. It flew its first science mission in November 2010 and now costs about $80 million a year to operate.

Searching for a "Holy Grail"

McLean says the SOFIA telescope could show astronomers something that's considered a Holy Grail in their field: seeing a star being born. It happens in huge, dusty clouds – stellar nurseries, as Mclean calls them. "The cloud is huge, light years across and it's gradually contracting to form a whole nursery of stars."

Inside NASA's SOFIA Observatory, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

But there's a problem. Astronomers can't see what's happening inside the clouds because, once again, they're made of dust and it's hard to see through.

"We don't mean dust bunnies, but we mean little, tiny little grains of solid material. Doesn't matter how big a telescope you have, you can't see inside it," McLean says.

That's why SOFIA looks at a special kind of light called infrared light. If you look through a telescope on the ground, you're looking at the visible light from space – the light our eyes can see. Infrared light is invisible to us, but it penetrates space dust, which means the telescope can see through the dust too.

"You get to see what you can't see with your eye. It's like a window has been opened," says McLean. They're looking for exactly how stellar nurseries give birth to young stars. McLean says catching a star as it's forming can reveal clues about how own solar system formed.

But star birth isn't the only thing these researchers want to see. They're also looking at the way stars die.

A Star on the Way Out

As the plane makes as sharp right turn, the telescope focuses on an object called NGC 7027. It's a planetary nebula – also known as a dying star. McLean and his team are capturing an infrared image of the nebula, which is about 3,000 light years away. They can also see what it's made of.

"It has a distinctive shape. It's oval. There's a hole in the middle and that's because it literally is a shell of gas that came off the star," says McLean.

7027 is dying because the star has run out of fuel – the same fate that our sun will face in about five billion years. As it dies, the star casts off its outer layers, shedding huge amounts of material to form a cloud around it. But it's not entirely a sad story.

"It won't be wasted," says McLean. "The material that was thrown off by that star in its dying phase, somewhere, millions, perhaps billions of years from now, will find its way into a new star and the planets that form around it."

From dead stars come new stars – and planets like our own. The oxygen and nitrogen in our bodies were once formed inside a star. "The cosmos is within us," as astronomer Carl Sagan once said. "We're made of star stuff."

As sky begins to lighten, we descend towards the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in the Mojave Desert, where the plane is based. The SOFIA telescope is now undergoing service upgrades and then will return to the skies three times a week. Astronomers from around the world are lining up to get on board.

The Thirty Meter Telescope would be built in Hawaii, atop Mauna Kea at around 13,000 feet. Artist's interpretation courtesy of TMT Observatory Corporation.

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

Scientists from the University of California are working with a team of international researchers on one of the most high-profile science projects of this decade: an effort to construct the largest optical telescope on Earth.

The $986 million project is planned for the summit of Mauna Kea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, and will feature a primary mirror 98-feet in diameter.

Scientists working on the project hope to begin construction next year and complete it by 2018 or 2019. They say the facility, dubbed the Thirty Meter Telescope, will allow astronomers to observe with much more clarity some of the earliest stars and galaxies of the universe and investigate what they’re made of.

“We’ll be able to look back at the baby pictures of the universe and trace how it developed,” said Michael Bolte, director of the University of California Observatories and a member of the board of directors for the new telescope.

The telescope won approval last month from the University of Hawaii Board of Regents, which holds the lease to the site.

In addition to exploring the farthest reaches of the universe, the telescope also will be able to routinely and easily produce images of the more than 450 planets that have been discovered orbiting stars outside of our solar system.

Today, the existence of these so-called “exoplanets” can only be inferred by measuring the gravitational tugging forces exerted by the stars they orbit. The telescope also could help determine if some of them have atmospheres similar to Earth’s – the precursor to finding life on another planet.

“It will be one of the most important scientific facilities of the 21st century,” said Bolte, who is also a professor of astronomy at UC-Santa Cruz. “When we look back, it’s going to be the Large Hadron Collider and the Thirty Meter Telescope and I’m not sure what else.”

The project is a joint effort of the University of California, the California Institute of Technology and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy.

A sizable amount of its funding is coming from the Bay Area. The Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation, in Palo Alto, has pledged $200 million toward the telescope’s construction. The University of California and Caltech each plan to raise $50 million. And contributions are expected from the Canadian universities, as well as the governments of China, India and Japan. But 10 to 20 percent of the telescope’s budget still remains to be raised, said Bolte.

The new telescope’s 98-foot (30 meter) mirror would be three times as big as the mirrors on the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii, currently the biggest in the world, and also owned by the University of California and Caltech. The telescope would produce images three times as sharp as the 33-foot Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, and would be able to look at objects that are nine times fainter. This would make it possible for scientists to better understand the origins of the universe.

“The universe is 13.7 billion years old and we can see objects that are 13 billion years away, but all we get is fuzzy blobs,” said UC-Santa Cruz astronomer Garth Illingworth, chair of the telescope’s Science Advisory Committee. “We’d like to learn more about these stars and galaxies.”

In January of 2010, Illingworth and his team announced that they had observed the most distant galaxies ever seen. Looking back in time 13 billion years, they found galaxies that were just 600 or 700 million years from the Big Bang. Photographs of these galaxies, which appear as several tiny dots, were made by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Space-based telescopes like Hubble have an advantage over ground telescopes because they don’t have to contend with the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. But they’re more expensive and therefore, smaller. Hubble’s mirror is less than 8 feet in diameter.

Bigger ground-based telescopes can gather more light than small space-based telescopes. So they make objects that once were faint appear brighter. And the additional light gives researchers information on the chemical composition of objects like stars.

When astronomers understand what a star is made out of, they can better establish its age. And this allows them to plot out the history of the universe more accurately. What’s understood now is that the Big Bang was followed by a period of darkness that astronomers call the Dark Ages. But it’s not clear how long that period lasted.

“There’s controversy about the period before which there were no stars,” said Jerry Nelson, UC-Santa Cruz astronomer and project scientist for the telescope. “The idea is to establish bounds on this. The question is when do you get stars forming that burn holes through this opaque stuff?”

In addition to answering questions about the history of the universe, observers say the telescope could also eventually lead to new energy sources based on the nuclear fusion that fuels stars.

“All those points of light are nuclear furnaces,” said bestselling San Francisco author Timothy Ferris, who wrote “Seeing in the Dark” and other books about astronomy and telescopes. “And they have something to teach us.”

The telescope’s mirror will be made out of 492 closely fit individual hexagonal glass mirrors. The Keck telescopes were the first to use these segmented mirrors to get around the problems created by gigantic individual mirrors. The Keck telescopes were so successful, said Illingworth, that UC and Caltech envisioned the Thirty Meter Telescope as a way to scale-up the Keck model.

TMT Fly-Through from Thirty Meter Telescope on Vimeo.

But big ground-based telescopes have their limitations. Though they can give astronomers more light to study, they can’t by virtue of their size alone make objects appear sharper. To reduce the blurring caused by the atmosphere, scientists use a series of techniques called adaptive optics.

“Adaptive optics is like putting glasses on a big telescope,” said Nelson. A telescope with adaptive optics not only sees sharper images of stars, it also sees more stars.

An expensive and technically complicated process, adaptive optics was used on telescopes for the first time to correct distortions on the Keck telescopes. The technique takes advantage of a layer of the atmosphere that starts about 50 miles above the Earth. This layer is made up of sodium atoms brought in by small meteorites that vaporize as they enter the atmosphere.

Scientists point an orange laser toward the sodium layer. The laser excites the sodium atoms, which become like artificial stars, radiating light back toward the telescope. The process allows researchers to correct for atmospheric turbulence, which causes phenomena such as the twinkle that we see around stars.

Other telescopes in the range of the Thirty Meter Telescope are in the works. An 80-foot mirror called the Giant Magellan Telescope is being spearheaded by a group that includes the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Harvard University, the universities of Texas and Arizona and the government of Korea. That telescope is scheduled to be completed in 2018. And Europe is working on the aptly named Extremely Large Telescope, which would have a 138-foot mirror.

“They’re strongly complimentary,” said Bolte. “The Giant Magellan and the European telescope will be in the southern hemisphere, in Chile. So we’ll have access to the entire sky.” Having several of these instruments, he said, would make valuable telescope time more readily available to astronomers.

The Thirty Meter Telescope, which would be built at an elevation of about 13,000 feet, has not been without controversy. Environmentalists say its construction would harm the wekiu bug, a native species that lives atop high Hawaiian peaks. Some Native Hawaiians have come out in opposition, saying that the summit of Mauna Kea is sacred and should not have any more construction.

Scientists hope that the Thirty Meter Telescope will provide answers for many current astronomy questions: What is the invisible matter that makes up 25 percent of universe? What is the mysterious energy that is making it expand faster and faster? But Bolte suspects that just as telescopes in the past surprised scientists by revealing that the planets orbit the Sun and that the universe is expanding, the new telescope’s contributions are impossible to fully predict.

“Every time you build a new telescope with significant new capabilities, you usually solve the problems of the day and find new things you didn’t even know were there,” Bolte said. “The Thirty Meter Telescope will be a bigger jump than any other jump we’ve had, so the new discoveries will be all the more unexpected.”

***

TMT Overview from Thirty Meter Telescope on Vimeo.

Check out these QUEST TV and Radio stories about other University of California astronomy projects:

Illuminating the Northern Lights

Exoplanets

SETI: The New Search for ET

The Planet Hunters

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The shadow of Chabot's "solar clock" at noon
on the equinox produces a pattern of solid green
straddling the gnomonI noticed late in the afternoon a couple days ago that the windowless hallway where we hang all of our family photos was afire in a shaft of bright sunlight, entering a window in the adjacent bedroom. Only around Equinox (Spring or Fall), when the Sun sets about directly west, does this happen in my house. The rest of the year the Sun sets too far north or south for this window-and-hallway alignment to take place. It's a striking event because for only a few days of the year my normally dark hallway explodes with radiance.

Ancient cultures all around the world made use of the changing rise and set position of the Sun to track the seasons, and either observed special alignments of sunlight and shadow with geographical features, or built structures that made the special alignments. Stonehenge is one famous example, but there are plenty of other seasonal observatories in just about every part of the world.

Unlike the more distant stars in the sky, which always rise and set at the same points on the horizon, the Sun (a star too, of course) wanders northward and southward in the sky throughout the year, and so its rise and set points migrate. On the Equinoxes the Sun rises directly at the east point on the horizon and sets directly at the west point-but at Summer Solstice in the Bay Area it rises a full 30 degrees to the north, and at Winter Solstice 30 degrees to the south.

The reason for the Sun's annual wandering comes from the tilt of Earth's rotational axis with its orbit around the Sun. At our (Northern Hemisphere) Summer Solstice, our hemisphere is tipped toward the Sun and the Sun appears at its most northerly point in the sky; we receive more hours of sunlight and more direct rays from the Sun-so it's warmer. Winter Solstice is opposite, with our hemisphere tipped away and the Sun and the Sun farthest to the south, making for shorter hours of daylight and less direct solar rays–and so it's colder.

Equinox is a middle point between solstices: the Sun is poised between the northern and southern extreme points of the solstices-positioned directly over Earth's equator-and the hours of daylight and night are about equal.

Does your home or place of work function as a solar seasonal calendar, as mine does? Is there a special time of year when you notice a striking pattern of light and shadow, a special alignment of walls, windows, doors, or other features? From the location of Chabot Space & Science Center, at equinox the Sun sets directly on the Golden Gate Bridge… .

If you have noticed something like this, then you've experienced what many ancient peoples noticed about the seasonal changing of the Sun. Their observations led them to understanding, or at least making use of, the cycle of the Earth revolving about the Sun to establish the earliest calendar systems.

Take a look and see what you notice, especially around Equinox (March 19, Pacific Time-March 20 GMT).

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

The original Oakland Observatory in the 1880’s,
at Lafayette Square in Oakland. Credit: Chabot Space
& Science Center archives.

Originally established as the Oakland Observatory in 1883, the facility was a unique creature from the very beginning. Conceived by then Oakland Public Schools Superintendent Jewett Gilson, who was inspired by a school observatory he saw in Philadelphia, the observatory was created for use by Oakland schools and the general public at large.

Gilson looked for, and eventually found, a donor to fund the observatory project: Anthony Chabot, a wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist who made his fortune building municipal water systems in the Bay Area– including Lake Temescal and Lake Chabot. Anthony Chabot stipulated as part of his original $3,000 gift that the telescope shall forever be available for public observation at not cost– a tradition that continues today.

Chabot didn't want the observatory to be named for him, so in its earliest years it was called the Oakland Observatory. The public, as the story goes, insisted on calling it Chabot Observatory in gratitude for the gift– and eventually the name was made official.

The original location for the observatory and its 8-inch Alvan Clarke and Sons telescope ("Leah") was close to downtown Oakland in Lafayette Square– which today remains a square block of parkland, at 10th and 11th Streets and Martin Luther King Junior Way and Jefferson Street. In those days, 10 or so visitors on any given night would climb the tower-like structure to the telescope dome and peer at the heavens through the high quality instrument. Reservations had to be made in advance– sometimes as long as a month or two.

As Oakland grew, and particularly as it converted its street lighting from gas-powered lamps to electric lights, the necessity of moving the observatory to a darker spot grew. The observatory’s first director, Charles Burckhalter (who is said to have been the first person in Oakland with an astronomical telescope, set up in a backyard observatory at his home on Chester Street), arranged for the relocation. A number of different sites were considered– including a spot near Redwood Peak, the current location of the observatory– but a small hill next to the Mills College campus was finally adopted.

In 1915, Chabot Observatory opened at its new site, along with a new 20-inch Warner and Swasey telescope ("Rachel"), and continued to wow the public with the astronomical vistas it conveyed. In 1923 the directorship passed to Earle Linsley, a Mills College professor, who expanded the reach of the observatory to the public through outreach to schools and the establishment of an amateur astronomy group (today the Eastbay Astronomical Society).

Having visited this Chabot Observatory as a child in the 1960s, I now appreciate how long and distinguished a career those two telescopes spanned. At the time, I had no idea that Leah, even in 1968, was 85 years old-older than my grandparents! Then the observatory was run by the beloved Kingsley Wightman — "Mr. Science" to a generation or two.

It took the moving Earth to relocate the observatory a second time– literally. Because of Chabot Observatory’s location almost directly on top of the Hayward Fault, and the fact that the aging buildings were not quake– safe in the first place, another site had to be found: the present location of Chabot Space & Science Center, adjacent to Redwood Peak.

Happy 125th to Oakland’s special connection with the stars!

Benjamin Burress is a staff astronomer at The Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

Hawkins isn't your ordinary astronomer. She began her career in an ordinary way: Ph. D. in Astronomy from UCLA, using mathematical models and computer simulations to give meaning to her observations. Along the way, she began to learn about how ancient people studied the sky. She's worked with us on our Ancient Observatories website, and hosted an equinox webcast from the top of the Mayan pyramid in the ancient astronomical site of Chichen Itza. And she's devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to understanding and appreciating how the knowledge of ancient people complements what modern scientists study today.

Most scientists today don't learn much about ancient knowledge. Observations such as measurements of the sun's movement across glyph-crusted temples don't usually meet the rigorous criteria of the scientific process: observe, create hypothesis, test, reproduce results.

In some instances, ancient people followed similar practices that were very similar to those used by modern scientists, observing things systematically and trying to devise explanations that will result in correct predictions. And sometimes the knowledge they gathered was, in fact, so "scientific" that modern researchers use it in their work today.

Take, for example, the knowledge of the Aymara Indians in Peru. The well-being of these adept weather-watchers was dependent on knowing how to time the planting of their vital potato crop with the arrival of the season's first rains sometime between October and December. They did this by making observations like meteorologists might today. They watched the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters constellation rise each night, and noted how fuzzy or clear it looked in the sky. Fuzziness caused by cirrus clouds high in the sky, meant rains were a ways off, and potato planting should be postponed. A clearly visible set of Sisters meant rains would come soon.

In 2002, Ben Orlove an environmental scientist at UC Davis, published a paper about the accuracy of the Aymara's observations of the Pleiades. It turned out that these ancient observations could be used by modern scientists to discern El Nino patterns in the past. Fascinating, since these measurements were taken long before there was a formal science of meteorology. Ancient knowledge becomes data points in modern research.

Hawkins cited another example: Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, has used generations-old folk tales of the Coast Salish Indians to help inform her computer modeling of earthquakes. The tales recount a serpent that knew where and when an earthquake would strike. By adapting location information from the stories into her computer models, Ludwin has found several small faults in the Seattle area that may have been active hundreds of years ago when the stories were created and may still pose a risk to local communities.

"It's interesting that what we call evidence can come in many forms," Hawkins says. "It might be part of a song, or a glyph writing or an artistic piece or a story."

And sometimes the records we keep and the stories we tell have more meaning than we can imagine when we create them.

Robin Marks is a journalist and science writer who current serves as a Multimedia Projects Developer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA.

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