With a little help from our friends: Finding a home for E-ELT March 4, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, politics . 2comments
Cerro Paranal (middle right) and Cerro Armazones (middle left)
ESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as the frontrunner, “because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and it can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing ESO Paranal Observatory”.
So does this means the deal is done? Apparently not. The text also tells us that ESO have received proposals to host the telescope from both Spain, who would like to see the telescope site on La Palma, and Chile, so a final run-off between these two countries now seems likely.
What has struck me about this whole site selection exercise is the different approaches taken by ESO for the E-ELT and their North American counterparts, the Thirty Meter Telescope project.
First steps in direct exoplanet spectroscopy January 16, 2010
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy . 2comments
Top: Image of star HR8799 and its exoplanet HR8799c (ESO/M.Janson). Bottom: The spectrum as recorded by the NACO detector, prior to extraction ; the vertical direction is spatial, horizontal is spectral (M. Janson et al, 2010)
Astronomers collaborating from both sides of the Atlantic have obtained the first direct spectrum of an exoplanet. The news here is mainly that they managed to record the spectrum and separate it reliably from that of the host star. Their short letter in ApJ, posted to astro-ph yesterday, doesn’t delve deeply into the implications of what they found but focuses more on the way they obtained, processed and analysed their data to separate the planet’s signature from that of the star.
Future facilities: Coming quite close now actually November 22, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, me, science . Add a commentThis week saw several major developments in my work on instrumentation for astronomy, and as I got lots of Twitter response, I thought I would talk a bit more about them here.
Exoplanets continue to inspire October 27, 2009
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, science . 1 comment so far
At a conference last week, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of 32 new exoplanets. This confirms what many already suspected: they’re everywhere! The disoveries were made by European astronomers based around Prof. Michel Mayor’s group at the Observatory of Geneva, who continue to increase their exoplanet tally since they spotted the first one around a regular star, back in 1995. Their secret? A small telescope with a damn fine instrument, that they themselves built specifically for the job.
Adventures in ELT Wonderland August 26, 2009
Posted by sarah in: politics, science . 1 comment so far
Snazzy artist's rendering of the E-ELT, VLT and the Atomium
Optical and infrared observations are the bread and butter of astronomy. For thousands of years the earliest scientists were inspired by the light coming from the sun and the night sky, the light they could see with the unaided eye. These observations have shaped our vision of the world throughout history. Using modern telescopes we can see far beyond the wavelengths visible to the naked eye, catching the photons from the most distant known objects in the Universe, from radio waves through to the most energetic gamma rays. But it’s optical and infrared images, like those produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, that still prove the most inspiring to many scientists and the public.
For the past 2 years I’ve been involved in the planning of the next generation of optical/IR observatories, the European Extremely Large Telescope or E-ELT. Specifically, I work on the design of a potential instrument for this mammoth of a telescope, whose 42-m primary mirror diameter will be four times larger than the largest optical telescopes in the world today. Previous generations of telescopes have always seen an approximate doubling of mirror size, and this new generation of observatories signal an important departure from this trend – a hugely ambitious endeavour by all accounts.
