Announcements The second project presentations are next time, Wednesday April 30 at 4:30pm. If we don’t get through all of them the others will present Monday May 5 Exam 3 is Monday May 5. If there are presentations to be made, they will be done first and then the exam will be given. It will be a 1-hour exam like the others. Covers Chapters 8 & 9. Sample questions are posted on the class website.

The Next Generation of Telescopes The GMT and Thirty- Meter Telescopes will be enormous. The LSST, while only 8.2-m, will add the time domain

There are now two methods for making BIG telescopes Combine 8.2m mirrors or make 1-m segments and combine lots of them The 1-m segments are made using “traditional” methods. The 8.2m mirrors are spin-cast

The Steward Mirror Lab is where all 8.2m mirrors are made

Space Telescopes The HST has been up for 24 years. It is “only” a 2.4-m telescope. The James Webb Telescope is slated for launch in It will be a 6.5-m telescope.

Radio Astronomy pre-WWII In the 1930’s Karl Jansky detected a signal from the direction of the center of the Milky Way Also in the 1930’s Grote Reber did scans of the sky in radio wavelengths

After WWII radio astronomy began to advance rapidly The NRAO was established in 1956 and radio telescopes began sprouting in Green Bank WV

By 1963 the Arecibo Radio Telescope was built Built in a natural hollow in the mountains of Puerto Rico the dish is 300-m across

The Very Large Array (VLA) is Socorro NM uses interferometry Each of the 27 dishes is 25-m in diameter

Radio telescopes were able to penetrate the obscuring dust and show the spiral structure of the Milky Way

Radio telescopes also began discovering objects outside the Milky Way Cygnus A was one of the first “radio loud” galaxies but because the radio lobes were so far from the galaxy, the two weren’t associated together for some time

Radio astronomy also answered the “Big Question” in cosmology Fred Hoyle was the leading proponent of the Steady State Theory. It proposed that new matter was being created in intergalactic space to make new galaxies as the older galaxies moved away

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson ended the debate In 1963 the two had been trying to calibrate a radio horn for satellite communication when they discovered the cosmic background radiation. A group at Princeton, headed by Robert Dicke, was trying to build a radio telescope to look for the CBR at the same time but were scooped.

Beyond Radio and Visible To “see” wavelengths other than visible and radio requires telescopes above the Earth’s atmosphere and astronomy benefited from the space race between the US and USSR

Early “telescopes” were put on V-2 rockets Equipment would be loaded where the warhead had been and sent as high as possible

After Sputnik, space astronomy literally took off The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory was launched in 1968 and lasted for 8 years.

Skylab carried several small telescopes Among the telescopes was a small x-ray telescope that was used to study the Sun

By the 1980’s a number of space telescopes were launched IRAS, an infrared telescope, was launched in 1983 COBE was launched in 1989

Planetary astronomy has benefited the most

While they weren’t astronomers, the Apollo astronauts learned a lot

The discovery of exotic objects

First came the discovery of star- like objects that were radio loud In visible light they looked like a star but they were radio loud and stars don’t produce radio waves so they were called Quasi Stellar Radio Sources or Quasars

Maarten Schmidt measured the spectra of a quasar and found extreme redshift

Eventually a super massive black hole theory is proposed The jet from a central supermassive black hole creates radio lobes when it plows into intergalactic gas. The bright accretion disk around the black hole is only the size of the solar system, thus the star-like appearance

The Hubble Space Telescope was eventually able to resolve host galaxies

In 1967 Jocelyn Bell, working under Antony Hewish, discovered pulsars

Pulsars are spinning neutron stars Light is emitted out the magnetic axis via synchrotron emission

Binary pulsars have proven General Relativity under extreme conditions The first were discovered by Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor in The won the Nobel Prize for it in 1993

The Universe is a violent place

The discovery of Quasars was one of the early hints of violence The environment around the event horizon is one of the most violent places in the universe

Pulsars are also violent places Eruptions from the surface of magnetars, extremely magnetic neutron stars, can lead to flashes of gamma rays and other high energy radiation.

White dwarfs in binary systems can produce nova and supernova

Red and Blue Supergiants eventually go supernova

And then there are the small scale things

The ultimate in violence was the Big Bang

The gulf between astronomers on the cutting edge and ordinary people