hello good day everyone welcome to another session in astronomy if you look at the sky when you are

far
away from the city lights there seem to be an overwhelming number of stars up there in reality only about 9
000 stars are visible with an aided eye from both hemispheres of the planet the light from most stars is so big
that by the time it reaches earth it can't be detected by the human eye so how can we learn about the vast
majority of objects in the universe that our unaided eyes simply cannot see in this chapter we describe the
tools astronomers use to extend their vision into space in the 20th century our exploration of space made it
possible to detect electromagnetic radiation at all wavelengths from gamma rays to radio waves the different
wavelengths carry different kinds of information and the appearance of any given object often depends on
the wavelength at which the observations are made let's discuss telescopes this serves as a bucket for
collecting visible light or radiation at other wavelengths as shown in this figure this shows the orion region
at different wavelengths the same part of the sky looks different when observed with instruments that are
sensitive to different bands of the spectrum visible light in figure a shows part of the orient region as seen by
the unaided eye with dotted lines added to show the figure of the mythical hunter orion figure b shows x-
rays the view emphasizes the point like x-ray sources nearby the colors are artificial changing from yellow
to white to blue with increasing energy of the x-rays the bright hot stars in orion are still seen in this image
but so are many other objects located at very different distances including other stars star corpses and
galaxies at the edge of the observable universe in figure c infrared rotation we mainly see the glowing dust
in this region just as you can catch more rain with a garbage can with a coffee cup large telescopes cover
much more light than your eye can second there is an instrument attached to the telescope that sorts the
incoming radiation by wavelength sometimes the sorting is fairly crude for example we might simply want
to separate blue light from red light so that we can determine the temperature of a star but at other times we
want to see individual spectral lines to determine what an object is made of or to measure its speed third we
need some type of detector a device that senses the rotation in the wavelength lingering we choose and
permanently record the observations the history of the development of astronomical telescopes is about how
new technologies have been applied to improve the efficiency of these three basic components the
telescopes the wavelength sorting device and the detectors now let's first look at the development of the
telescope the most important functions of a telescope are one to collect the faint light from an astronomical
source and two to focus all the light into a point or an image most objects of interest to astronomers are
extremely faint the more light we can collect the better we can study such objects and remember even
though we are focusing on visible light first there are many telescopes that collect other kinds of
electromagnetic rotation let's calculate the light collecting area of a telescope the question is what is the area
of a one meter diameter telescope a four meter diameter one the solution using the equation for the area of a
circle we have area is equals to pi diameter squared over four the area of a one meter telescope is pi times
one meter squared over four is equal to zero point seventy nine meters squared the area of a four meter
telescope is 12.6 meters squared most telescopes have mirrors or lenses so we can compare their light
gathering power by comparing the apertures or diameters of the opening through which light travels or
reflects the amount of light a telescope can collect increases with the size of the aperture a telescope with a
mirror that is four meters in diameter can collect 16 times as much light as a telescope that is one meter in
diameter the diameter is squared because the area of a circle equals pi times diameter squared over four
where diameter or d is the diameter of the circle show that the ratio of the two areas is 16 is to 1. remember
12.6 meters square as the area 4 4 meter diameter telescope and 0.79 meter square for the 1 meter diameter
telescope divide these two you have 16. therefore with 16 times the area a 4 meter telescope collects 16
times the light of a 1 meter telescope let's talk about formation of an image by a lens or a mirror whether or
not you wear glasses you see the world through lenses they are key elements of your eyes a lens is a
transparent piece of material that bends the rays of light passing through it if the light rays are parallel as
they enter the lens prints them together in one place to form an image if the curvatures of the lens surfaces
are just right all parallel rays of light say from a star are bent or reflected in such a way that they converge
toward a point called the focus of the lens at the focus an image of the light source appears in the case of
parallel light rays the distance from the lens to the location where the light rays focus or image behind the
lens is called the focal length since newton's time when the sizes of the mirror mirrors in telescopes were
measured in interest reflecting telescopes have grown even larger in 1948 u.s astronomers built a telescope
with a 5 meter diameter mirror on palomar mountain in southern california it remained the largest visible
light telescope in the world for several decades the giants of today however have primary mirrors the largest
mirrors in the telescope that are 8 to 10 meters in diameter and larger ones are being built so that figure
shows one of the giant or the largest visible telescope in the world modern visible light and infrared
telescopes technological advancements had finally made it possible to build telescopes significantly larger
than the 5 meter telescope at palomar at a reasonable cost new technologies have also been designed to work
well in the infrared and not just visible wavelengths the differences between the palomar telescope and the
modern gemini north telescope are easily seen in the figure the polymer telescope is massive steel structure
designed to hold the 14.5 ton primary mirror with a 5 meter diameter glass tends to sag under its own weight
hence a huge steel structure is needed to hold the mirror a mirror 8 meters in diameter the size of the gemini
north telescope if it were built using the same technology as the polymer telescope would have to weigh at
least eight times as much and would require an enormous steel structure to support it the eight meter gemini
north telescope looks like a featherweight by contrast and indeed it is the mirror is only about 8 inches thick
and weighs 24.5 tons less than twice as much as the palomar mirror the gemini north telescope was
completed about 50 years after the palomar telescope engineers took advantage of new technologies to build
a telescope that is much lighter in weight relative to the size of the primary mirror voyagers in astronomy
george oliver hale was a giant among early telescope builders not once about four times he initiated projects
that led to the construction of what was the world's largest telescope at the time and he was semester at
winning over wealthy benefactors to underwrite the construction of these new instruments hale's training
and early research were in solar physics in 1892 at age 24 he was named associate professor of astrophysics
and director of the astronomical observatory at the university of chicago at the time the largest telescope in
the world was a 36 inch refractor at the leak observatory near san jose california taking advantage of an
existing glass blank for a 40-inch telescope hale set out to raise money for a larger telescope than the one at
leak one prospective donor was charles d yerkes who among other things ran the trolley system in chicago
performance of a telescope is determined not only by the size of its mirror but also by its location here we
will discuss the factors in picking the best observing sites earth's atmosphere survived out the life presents
challenges for the observational astronomer in at least four ways our air imposes limitations and the
usefulness of telescopes one weather conditions two tri-sides generally found at high altitudes three the sky
above the telescope should be dark and four the air is soft and steady the past observatory sites are therefore
high dark and dry the world's largest telescopes are found in such remote mountain locations as the andes
mountains of chile the desert peaks of arizona the canary islands in the atlantic ocean and the mauna kea in
hawaii a normal volcano with an altitude of 13 700 feet astronomers are always eager to make out more
detail in the images to study whether they are following the weather in jupiter or trying to peer into the
violent heart of a cannibal galaxy that recently ate its neighbor for lunch one factor that determines how
good the resolution will be the size of the telescope now let's talk about the resolution of a telescope this
reference to the precision of detail present in an image that is the smallest features that can be distinguished
larger apertures produce sharper images until very recently however visible light and infrared telescopes on
earth's surface could not produce images as sharp as a theory of light said they should the problem is our
planet's atmosphere which is turbulent it contains many small scale blobs or cells of gas that range in from
size inches to several feet each cell has slightly different temperature from its neighbor and each cell acts
like a lens bending the path of the light by small amount this bending slightly changes the position where
each light ray finally reaches a detector in a telescope the cells of air are in motion constantly being blown
through the light path of the telescope by winds often in different directions of different altitudes as a result
the path followed by the light is constantly changing the resolution of an image is measured in units of angle
on the sky typically in units of arc seconds one arc second is one over three thousand six hundred degree and
there are 360 degrees in a full circle so we are talking about tiny angles on the sky but since we can't put
every telescope into space astronomers have devised a technique called adaptive optics that can beat earth's
atmosphere at its own game of blurring this technique which is most effective in the infrared version of the
spectrum with our current technology makes use of a small flexible mirror placed in the beam of a telescope
a sensor measures how much the atmosphere has distorted the image and as often as 500 times per second it
sends instructions to the flexible mirror in how to change shape in order to compensate for distortion is
produced by the atmosphere the light is thus brought back to an almost perfectly sharp focus at the detector
this figure shows just how effective this technique is with adaptive optics ground-based telescopes can
achieve resolutions of 0.1 arc second or a little better in the infrared region of the spectrum this impressive
figure is the equivalent of the resolution that the hubble space telescope is achieved in the visible light
region of the spectrum after a telescope called excitation from an astronomical source the rotation must be
detected and measured the first detector is used for astronomical observations with the human eye but it
suffers from being connected to an imperfect recording and retrieving device the human brain photography
and modern electronic detectors have eliminated the quirks of human memory by making a permanent
record of the information from the cosmos the eye also suffers from having a very short integration time it
takes only a fraction of a second to add light energy together before sending the image to the brain one
important advantage of modern detectors is that the light from astronomical objects can be collected by the
detector over a longer period of time this technique is called taking a long exposures of several are are
required to detect very faint objects in the cosmos the photographic and electronic detectors the instrument
between telescope and detector may be one of several devices that spread the light out into its full rainbow
of colors so that astronomers can measure individual lines in the spectrum such an instrument is called a
spectrometer because it allows astronomers to measure or to meter the spectrum of a source of rotation
whether a filter or a spectrometer both types of wavelength sorting instruments still have to use detectors to
record and measure the properties of light astronomers today have much more efficient electronic detectors
to record astronomical images most often these are charge couple devices or cct's which are similar to the
detectors used in video camcorders or in digital cameras in a ccd photons of radiation hitting any part of the
detector generate a stream of charged particles or electrons that are stored and counted at the end of the
exposure each place where the origination is counted is called a pixel or picture element and modern
detectors can count the photons in millions of pixels or megapixels because ccd is typically record as much
as 60 to 70 percent of all the photons that strike them and the best silicon and infrared ccds exceed 90
sensitivity we can detect much fainter objects among these are many small moons around the outer planets
icy dwarf planets beyond pluto and dwarf galaxies of stories ccds also provide more accurate measurements
of the brightness of astronomical objects than photography and their output is digital in the form of numbers
certain encode directly into a computer for analysis this figure shows the ccd which is a mere 300
micrometers thick thinner than a human hair yet holds more than 21 million pixels and this matrix of 42 ccds
serves the kepler telescope spectroscopy it is one of the astronomers most powerful tools providing
information about the composition temperature motion and other characteristics of celestial objects more
than half of the time spent on most large telescopes is used for spectroscopy the many different wavelengths
present in light can be separated by passing them through a spectrometer to form a spectrum the design of a
simple spectrometer is illustrated light from the source actually the image of a source produced by the
telescope enters the instrument through a small hole or narrow slit and is collimated in the collimating lens
made into a beam of parallel rays by a lens the light then passes through a prism producing a spectrum
different wavelengths leave the prism in different directions because each wavelength is spent by a different
amount when it enters and leaves a prism a second lens placed behind the prism focuses in many different
images of the slit or entrance hole into a ccd or other detecting device this collection of images spread out by
color is the spectrum that astronomers can then analyze at a later point as spectroscopy spreads the light out
into more and more collecting beams fewer photons go into each bin so either a larger telescope is needed or
by the integration time must be greatly increased usually both there are also certain observations made
outside the earth's atmosphere infrared observations from airplanes have been made since the 1960s starting
with a 15 centimeter telescope on board a learjet from 1974 through 1995 thenasa operated a 0.9 meter
airborne telescope flying regularly out of the amis research center south of san francisco observing from an
altitude of 12 kilometers the telescope was above 99 of the atmospheric water vapor more recently nasa in
partnership with the german aerospace center has constructed a much larger 2.5 meter telescopecalled the
statospheric observatory for infrared astronomy or sophia which flies in a modified buoying 747sp the most
powerful of these infrared telescopes is the 0.5 0.85 meter spitzer space telescope which launched in 2003. a
few of its observations are shown in this figure this figure shows the observations from the spitzer space
telescope or the ssd these infrared images origin of star formation there are not an unexploded star and a
region where an old star is losing its outer shell show just a few of the observations made and transmitted
back from the ssd since our eyes are not sensitive to infrared rays we don't perceive colors from them the
colors in these images have been selected by astronomers to highlight details like the composition or
temperature in these regions in april1990 a great leap forward in astronomy was made with the launch of the
hubble space telescope or hst with an aperture of 2.4 meters this is the largest telescope put into space so far
its aperture was limited by the size of the payload bay in the space shuttle that served as its launch vehicle it
was named for edwin hubble the astronomer who discovered the expansion of the universe in the 1920s with
the hubble astronomers have obtained some of the most detailed images of astronomical objects from the
solar system outward to the most distant galaxies among its many great achievements is the hubble ultra
deep field an image of a small region of the sky observed for almost 100 hours it contains views of about 10
000 galaxies some of which formed in the universe was just a few percent of its current age alright thank
you for listening i hope you learned something stay safe everyone our assessment will be posted later