Astronomers get New Tool to Search
for Answers to Monster Mystery
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News Release - School of Physics,
University of New South Wales
Monday 6th December 1999
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 When
is a little telescope more useful to astronomers than a big one?
When they are in a hurry. In a hurry? The stars don't move, do they?
No, most of them stay where they are but one of the greatest mysteries
in astronomy today remains a mystery because it happens so fast
it is almost impossible to observe.
Now UNSW astronomers have received a
$272,000 University grant to upgrade a small but agile telescope
at Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran so it can search
for these celestial mysteries in the Southern sky. They have also
been given a robotic telescope through a University of Michigan
and NASA grant as part of a world-wide consortium.
"The main events we will be looking
for are called gamma ray bursts, or GRBs," said Dr
Michael Ashley, the astrophysicist in charge of the project.
"GRBs, are immense 'flashes' of gamma
rays that occur anywhere in the sky, at any time. There are dozens
of theories to explain GRBs but not one of them really makes sense.
Among the many things we don't know about them is where they come
from. They don't come from our solar system, they don't come from
our galaxy, they don't appear to come from any galaxy. All we know
is that they are fantastically powerful. If one went off in our
galaxy it would be as devastating as the collision that is believed
to have wiped out the dinosaurs."
"All this makes them one of the hottest
topics in astronomy, which is why the rush is on to swing a telescope
to the site of a GRB, in the hope of finding a visible remnant of
it. Then we can study it, measure its distance from Earth and try
to work out what causes it."
"To pinpoint the source exactly we have
to have an optical telescope collecting data from the region within
about 30 seconds of the start of the burst, which we learn about
from satellite gamma ray observatories."
"The University grant allows us to take
advantage of an offer of two huge CCD (charge-coupled device) chips
from the University of Washington. These will allow us to enormously
upgrade our cameras, capturing 72 megabytes in each image," he said.
The telescopes will also search for
new planets and other near-Earth objects such as asteroids.
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