UNSW Astronomers Save the Day in Space
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Media Release - School of Physics
The University of New South Wales
Monday 25th October 1998
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After seven years of impressive performance,
the Hubble Space Telescope is about to be threatened by a meteor
storm that the Earth and its satellites will pass through in November
1998. To protect its mirror and delicate instruments, Hubble, the
largest telescope in space, will be forced to duck its head and
look the other way.
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Image Left :The
Hubble Space Telescope during servicing in 1993. Can you recognise
part of the West Australian coastline?
Image Right :
A view of the Hubble Space Telescope being launched in 1990.
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The Leonid meteor storm will take place
on November 17, 1998. The director of the Hubble Space Telescope
announced from the headquarters in Baltimore (USA) that the telescope
will be pointed in a direction exactly opposite to that from which
the meteoroids are coming. This situation will last for 10 hours.
Would any team of astronomers in the
planet find some exciting project to be performed by the telescope
during that time? Or would those extremely valuable hours be lost?
Fortunately, 27 proposals coming from all corners of the world came
up with suggestions to make use of these 10 hours. And out of those
27, the one presented by a team of astronomers from UNSW has been
selected as the best proposal.
The UNSW group realised that the tiny
patch of sky the Hubble Space Telescope will be looking at contains
a distant quasar. Quasars are among the brightest, most distant
objects in the Universe. This particular one was actually discovered
some years ago by the Parkes radio telescope here in Australia.
The winning UNSW proposal will use the Hubble Space Telescope to
measure the distance to all the galaxies in a small patch of the
sky in front of the quasar and study how they interact with the
light from the quasar. This will provide a unique insight into the
nature of these distant galaxies.
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Image Above :
The Hubble Deep Field, a very sensitive image made with
the Hubble Space Telescope showing the sort of very distant
galaxies the UNSW team propose to study during the Leonids
meteoroid shower.
Hubble Deep Field
HST WFPC2
ST Sci OPO January 15, 1996 R. Williams and the HDF Team
(ST Scl) and NASA
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Dr. Alberto Fernandez-Soto
Dr. Michael Drinkwater
Dr. John Webb
Dr. Katrina Sealey*
Dr. Lewis Jones
Dr. Amelia Ortiz-Gil
Mr. Jochen Liske
Department of Astrophysics
& Optics
School of Physics
The University of New South Wales
* Macquarie University
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Further Information
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