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21 March: Planck Day

March 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment
planck_microwave

The microwave sky as seen by Planck. Most of the signal originates in the Milky Way, the faint CMB pattern can be seen in the background.

A big day for science today, as at last we’ll find out some of the first cosmology results from the Planck telescope. Planck was launched together with the Herschel Space Telescope back in 2009, to perform an all-sky survey at microwave wavelengths. The survey will produce – or rather, has now produced – the most detailed and sensitive map of the Cosmic Microwave Background to date.

The CMB is essentially flat and constant all over the sky, but on closer (much closer) inspection, small fluctuations become visible. These tiny fluctuations, at the level of 1 part in 100,000 or so, are thought to be the precursors to the large scale structures we see today in the Universe – from the largest Galaxy clusters to individual stars.

Looking for and studying signals this faint is very involved and challenging work – a lot of foreground signal originating in our own Galaxy or those in the vast Universe around us have to be accounted for and removed. These “noise” was released to the community some time ago, so the rest of us could play around with the data for our menial star formation or galaxy clustering research. The Planck consortium have chosen not to release the real goodies, the cosmological results, until they felt confident about the results – which is apparently today. The level of “lockdown” and secrecy surrounding these results is quite unprecedented in astronomy as far as I know, and I’ve talked with many people who don’t agree with their chosen policy. “Open science” it definitely isn’t – but if anything, it’s a good way to ensure that your results will make a big splash on their release. However you feel about  the road the mission leaders chose, these scientists deserve their moment in the spotlight. I look forward to seeing the exciting new results!

ESA is hosting a media briefing at 10 am this morning, and an open session will take place from 14:00 to 15:45 (CET) this afternoon. You can watch it live on ESA’s webpage, here.

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MIRI on a Jetplane

May 20, 2012 by 3 Comments

Last week, I said a little goodbye to MIRI. In a UK Space Agency-sponsored swanky bash in central London, the MIRI team got the official confirmation that the instrument is cleared for shipping to our NASA colleagues at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where it will be prepared for integration with the spacecraft that will carry the James Webb Space Telescope into space.

It was a day of looking back, ceremony and celebration, rather than schedules and problem-solving, for the benefit of the various officials from space and funding agencies and the media. In the afternoon, we heard a speech from the UK Science Minister David Willetts, and I particularly enjoyed the talk by Mark McCaughrean of ESA, about making dreams come true. Yes, there was some cheesiness, but you know, once in a while you have to chuck out the hard-nosed cynicism and make time for that.

There was some nice media coverage, particularly from the BBC. Here’s an interview with Eric Smith, the deputy programme director for JWST at NASA, Jonathan Amos visiting MIRI and RAL, and another longer article + video from Amos. Will Gater also vsited RAL and produced this nice video for the Sky at Night Magazine.

People always ask me whether this is now the end for the European involvement in MIRI, and of course it isn’t. There’s a lot of work still to be done once MIRI is in the US – it will need to be integrated with the rest of the spacecraft, which means more testing up ahead. There’s software to be developed and calibration products to be delivered. As most MIRI expertise is currently in Europe, the European team has an important, if supporting, role to play in all that. It also means that we’re not quite done yet with MIRI meetings, and I’m looking forward to more time with the team I’ve so enjoyed working with these last 5 years.

Unusually for me, I brought my own camera and took some pictures of the proceedings for my own memory box. I thought I’d share a few of the ones that came out nicely.

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Great Day for Cosmology

October 4, 2011 by

Exciting times for cosmology. It’s Nobel Prize week again, and in the first bit of good news for the day, the Physics Nobel was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt. These three scientists were leaders in the studies of type Ia supernovae that led to the discovery of dark energy in 1998 [here's a primer on the science by Schmidt] – the mysterious phenomenon that causes the Universe to expand at a faster rate than we had previously thought.

Truly groundbreaking new results don’t happen very often in science – in fact, trying to think of those that are is quite a fun exercise. Of the last few decades, the discovery of dark energy from observations of distant supernovae is by far the most prominent groundbreaker I can ever think of. So it’s really no surprise that they are now receiving one of the highest honours, and it’s much deserved. (Of course so many physicists are deserving of big prizes, and these things are notoriously hard to predict.)

The second bit of good news for cosmologists is that ESA have officially selected the Euclid mission as one of its next medium-sized mission. Scheduled for launch in 2019, Euclid’s main objective is to study the nature of dark energy by measuring shapes and redshifts of a huge number of objects in the Universe over the entire sky. It’s a fascinating mission, both scientifically and technically, that we’re also involved in at MPIA. Great news for everyone involved.

We know so little about dark energy, a huge targeted survey like Euclid is bound to throw up some really intriguing new questions – perhaps even some answers? If you combine that with the fascinating stuff that’s going on in particle physics, faster than light neutrinos and such, it’s safe to say that cosmology is heading towards some really fun times!

[Very little blogging in recent weeks..... I'm having an exceptionally busy time at work at the moment, with proposal deadlines, and instrument deadlines, and the handover of MIRI to NASA on the immediate horizon. My Rule #1 for blogging is that blogging cannot cause me any extra stress - so for now it's on the backburner. More activity soon!]

 

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Credit where it’s due?

January 8, 2011 by

The Andromeda Galaxy in optical, IR and X-ray

Earlier this week, this amazing image of M31, the Andromeda galaxy, was splashed all over the media and the inernet. The image is a composite of optical, infrared and X-ray data, with the infrared image coming from the Herschel space telescope, launched in 2009. The picture has been featured and discussed in the media all week – rightly so, as it’s stunning. With Herschel, we can finally showcase far-infrared and submillimetre images that are just as beautiful as those produced at shorter wavelengths with Hubble, or VLT on the ground. Moreover, observing galaxies at these wavelengths at the level of detail enabled by Herschel is opening some big new windows onto the physics that governs the Universe, from right on our doorstep to billions of lightyears away. What I’m saying, if that wasn’t yet clear, is that this telescope is something to be very proud of.

The Daily Mail, however, decided to take a different approach – one that both misses the point, and is plain wrong. It sets the Herschel image side by side with an optical image of Andromeda, taken by British amateur astronomer Steve Loughran, and asks:

“One of these pictures was taken in a British back garden by an amateur using kit worth £10,000 – the other cost Nasa millions. But can you tell the difference?”

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Herschel looks into the Heart of Darkness

May 10, 2010 by

Star formation in Gould's Belt

Last week a big conference took place at the European Space Agency hub ESTEC, down the road in Noordwijk. The town was inundated with the lucky scientists who got to play with the first data from the new infrared space observatory Herschel and were finally allowed to talk about it to the rest of the world. And now that the conference is over, as expected, science from Herschel is everywhere!

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