Future of Astronomy Astronomy 315 Professor Lee Carkner Lecture 23

Yerkes Observatory 1897

The Future of Astronomy  What would we like to understand better?    Formation and evolution of stars and planets   Formation and evolution of black holes

Problems and Solutions  We want to study fainter objects   We want better detail   We want to study a broad range of astrophysical phenomena  Use multiwavelength telescopes

Key Initiatives  While much science is done with small and common instruments, there are several large and expensive new projects that we hope will lead to big breakthroughs  Three of these are:    A Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope

Webb Space Telescope  See earliest galaxies   View protoplanetary disks    To be launched in 2013 (?)  Cost:

Webb Format  Want to be both high performance and cheap    To get large mirror to fit in small launch vehicle, mirror folds up

Constellation X  Would have collecting area ~100 times larger than current X-ray telescopes  Would be able to get high resolution X-ray spectra of:      Key challenge is coordinating the 4 telescopes

Future Ground Based Telescopes  Currently the worlds largest telescope is the 10 meter Keck on Mauna Kea   Much larger telescopes are called ELTs   US is looking into a 30 meter Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope (GSMT)

Extremely Large Telescopes   Success of large telescopes depends on adaptive optics   ELT’s would complement NGST  For follow up observations that require greater sensitivity

Hobby Eberly Telescope 1997

Telescope Trends  21 st century astronomy versus 20 th century astronomy:   

Next Time  Meet in planetarium  Bring telescope sketches to hand in  Be prepared to sketch the Sun