In the mountains of North Carolina, a giant of Greek mythology is about to take shape. In October, an array of 38 small telescopes will begin observing a slice of visible sky 1700 times larger than the full Moon. It will register changes in the stars second by second and make a night long movie. The developers hope it will pave the way for a larger array of telescopes that will be able to see the entire sky.
Transients are short-lived or rapidly changing astrophysical events, such as exploding stars, black holes, and neutron star mergers. Nicholas Law of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the leader of the team.
The University of Maryland is not involved in the project. The archive of images will show objects before they explode or change. The history of everything that happens in the sky above a certain brightness will be known by us. A new era of time-domain astronomy is about to start with an explosion of different telescope designs.
There are hundreds of off-the-shelf telescopes that can be used to see a different patch of sky. The final array will match the light-gathering power of a telescope with a single 5-meter mirror, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but cheap components should keep the cost below $20 million. The challenge will be to combine the 900 images into a single movie of the night sky. Law says that they have spent a lot of time on the data.
His team built a small instrument. There were 27 telescopes that looked out from the surface of the dome. The team was able to see a flare larger than any seen before from our nearest neighbor star Proxima Centauri.
The telescopes will aim out a single window in a dome instead of looking out. The bowl and telescopes will follow the stars as the Earth rotates. Designers want to replace the charge-coupled device (CCD) light sensors used in most telescopes with metal-oxide-semiconductor detectors which can read out data in less than a second.
The National Science Foundation gave over a million dollars to fund the prototype. Law and colleagues expect to test it in the coming weeks before transferring it to a site in the Appalachian Mountains near Chapel Hill for further study and testing. After the turn of the year, the team hopes to be able to apply for funding from the National Science Foundation.
Automatic alert will be issued when the software discovers an event, and data from the successor will be freely available. It will allow larger telescopes to quickly move to the same spot in the sky and collect more detailed data, a boon for astronomy.
Observers don't usually see supernovae until hours after the event. It's important to get closer to the source of the explosion if you want to capture Transients. If the progenitor star is bright enough, Argus may record any sudden belches of gas before it dies. Kulkarni says that history is made available in a very comprehensive way.
It might have given an early glimpse of the light flash from the first ever recorded kilonova if it had been up and running in the year 2017. The first to sense the merger was the gravitational wave detectors, but they can't tell you where to look. Mundell wants simultaneous observations.
There is a chance that the elusive Planet 9 could be found in the Solar System. It may not be possible to see it right away. As it moves across the sky, background stars should stop blinking. "Occultations are certainly a promising avenue when it comes to Planet 9," says Konstantin Batygin of Caltech, who with colleague Mike Brown proposed its existence in 2016 It will definitely have lived up to its name if that discovery is made.
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