breakingnews:

Hawaii approves permit for world’s largest telescope

Pacific Business News:  A permit for the $1.3 billion Thirty Meter Telescope was approved by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources on Friday.

The telescope will be built on the summit of the volcano Mauna Kea by a group of research universities primarily from California and Canada.

Researchers believe the telescope will produce images three times sharper than those produced by optical telescopes today.

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Illustration courtesy TMT Observatory Corp

World’s largest space observatory opens in Chile

What is thought to be the world’s largest ground-based observatory opened in northern Chile, wielding unprecedented power to peer into the remotest regions of the universe.

The ALMA space observatory was inaugurated here on Wednesday on a desert plateau some 5,000 meters above sea level, at a ceremony attended by President Sebastian Pinera and other dignitaries.

“Here in this desert, the driest in the world, it is a great privilege to inaugurate the observatory,” Pinera said.

Calling it ‘the world’s most powerful,’ he said the observatory will make “a significant contribution to humanity, enable a better understanding of the universe in which we live, and perhaps help us discover life beyond Earth.”

“ALMA is a huge telescope 16 kilometers (10 miles) in diameter,” said the facility’s director Thijs de Graauw, as it was declared officially opened.

Amid excited applause, 59 of the 66 antennas slowly began to rotate and point toward the interior of the universe.

By October, all the antennas will be fully installed and operational. Gianni Marconi, an astronomer at the massive ground array of telescopes, recently proudly proclaimed to AFP that ALMA is ‘the largest observatory that has ever been built.’

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Big Bang Meets Big Data: South Africa Joins ASTRON and IBM to Build the Foundation for a New Era of Computing

Square Kilometer Array (SKA) South Africa, a business unit of the country’s National Research Foundation is joining ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) in a four-year collaboration to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems aimed at developing advanced technologies for handling the massive amount of data that will be produced by the SKA, which is one of the most ambitious science projects ever undertaken. 

The SKA is an international effort to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, which is to be located in Southern Africa and Australia to help better understand the history of the universe. The project constitutes the ultimate Big Data challenge, and scientists must produce major advances in computing to deal with it. The impact of those advances will be felt far beyond the SKA project—helping to usher in a new era of computing, which IBM calls the era of cognitive systems.

When the SKA is completed, it will collect Big Data from deep space containing information dating back to the Big Bang more than 13 billion years ago. The aperture arrays and dishes of the SKA will produce 10 times the global internet traffic*, but the power to process all of this data as it is collected far exceeds the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art technology.

As part of the global effort to solve this unprecedented challenge, last year, ASTRON and IBM launched a public-private partnership called DOME, to develop a fundamental IT roadmap for the SKA. The collaboration includes a user platform where organizations from around the world can jointly investigate emerging technologies in high-performance, energy-efficient computing, nanophotonics, and data streaming. Through its SKA South Africa unit, the National Research Foundation is now a user platform partner in DOME.

“The DOME collaboration brings together a dream team of scientists and engineers in an exciting partnership of public and private institutions. This project lays the foundation to help the scientific community solve other data challenges such as climate change, genetic information and personal medical data,” said Simon Ratcliffe, Technical Coordinator, DOME-South Africa.

Scientists from all three organizations will collaborate remotely and at the newly established ASTRON & IBM Center for Exascale Technology in Drenthe, the Netherlands.

More specifically, scientists from SKA South Africa will focus on the following research themes:

• Visualizing the challenge — fundamental research will be conducted into signal processing and advanced computing algorithms for the capture, processing, and analysis of the SKA data so clear images can be produced for astronomers to study;
• Desert-proof technology — the DOME team is researching and prototyping microserver architectures based on liquid-cooled 3D stacked chips. The team in South Africa will extend this research to make the microsevers rugged or “desert proof” to handle the extreme environmental conditions where the SKA will be located; and
• Software analytics — the 64 dishes of the MeerKat telescope in South Africa will be used for the testing and development of a sophisticated software program that will aid in the design of the entire computing system holistically and optimally—taking into account all of the cost and performance trade-offs for the eventual 3,000 SKA dishes.

“The DOME research has implications far beyond astronomy. These scientific advances will help build the foundation for a new era of computing, providing technologies that learn and reason. Ultimately, these cognitive technologies will help to transform entire industries, including healthcare and finance,” said Dr. Ton Engbersen, DOME project leader, IBM Research. “For example, we are designing a system for storing information that learns from its interactions with the data and parcels it out in real time to the storage medium that’s most appropriate for each bit, which can also be applied to medical images.”

“DOME is not only innovating in the laboratory, but our user platform is setting a new standard in open collaboration,” said Dr. Albert-Jan Boonstra, DOME project leader, ASTRON. “In addition to SKA South Africa, four additional organizations are expected to join in the coming weeks including universities and small and medium-sized businesses located in the Netherlands.”

The initial five-year DOME collaboration is realized with financial support of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation (EL&I) and from the Province of Drenthe.

Virtual Recruiting Event

IBM and ASTRON scientists will be hosting a SmartCloud virtual recruiting event on 26 March for several open positions within the DOME project. For details visitwww.zurich.ibm.com/astron/

Chile’s ALMA probes for origins of universe

Earth’s largest radio telescope is growing more powerful by the day on this remote plateau high above Chile’s Atacama desert, where visitors often feel like they’re planting the first human footprints on the red crust of Mars.

The 16,400-foot (5,000-meter) altitude, thin air and mercurial climate here can be unbearable. Visitors must breathe oxygen from a tank just to keep from fainting. Winds reach 62 mph (100 km) and temperatures drop to 10 below zero (minus 25 Celsius).

But for astronomers, it’s paradise.

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Kepler telescope spots 41 new exoplanets

The Kepler spacecraft tags potential planets by noting dips in a star’s brightness caused by a planet crossing in front of it.

PICTURED ABOVE: An artist rendering of NASA’s latest X-ray telescope.

NASA on Wednesday launched its newest X-ray space telescope on a mission to shine a light on black holes and other hard-to-see objects lurking in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Mission controllers clapped after receiving a signal from the telescope that it had reached orbit 350 miles above Earth.

“It’s a terrific day,” assistant launch director Tim Dunn said.

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NASA to launch black hole-hunting space telescope

The NuStar telescope will spend 2 years mapping black holes in the Milky Way.

Making music with real stars: Kepler Telescope star data creates musical melody

Why stop at the dark side of the moon to make music when you can look thousands of light years into space? That’s what a team of Georgia Tech researchers have done, using data from two stars in our galaxy to create sounds for a national recording artist.

Over the years, researchers in Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab (SonLab) have converted numerical data into sounds to analyze stock market prices, election results and weather data. When the reggae/rock band Echo Movement called wanting to turn the movements of celestial bodies into music, SonLab looked to the heavens.

“The Sonification Lab receives a lot of requests to convert scientific data into sound, but this one was truly unique,” said School of Psychology Professor Bruce Walker. “It’s not often that we have a chance to help an actual star compose music.”

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Green light for world’s biggest optical telescope

A 1.1 billion-euro project to build the world’s largest optical telescope will go ahead after the European organization overseeing it said it won backing from most of its members.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will directly image planets outside the solar system and those orbiting other suns in so-called “habitable zones” to perhaps answer the question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe.

It will use a mirror 39 meters in diameter that will give a more detailed and deeper view of the universe than ever before. Most large ground-based telescopes currently have mirrors eight to 10 meters across.

The large mirror on the ELT, made up from nearly 800 hexagonal segments, will gather 12 times more light than the largest optical telescopes operating today. It will be able to see objects that are much more distant and faint.

“Its unique combination of sharp imaging and huge light collecting area will allow us to observe some of the most exciting phenomena in the universe in much better detail,” said Isobel Hook, a scientist at Oxford University who is working on the project.

“For example we’ll be able to observe distant galaxies in the process of formation, see the effects of massive black holes on their environment and even search for planets in ‘habitable zones’ beyond our solar system, where life could exist.”

The European Southern Observatory’s Council met at its headquarters in Garching, Germany, on Monday where 10 countries gave the project full or conditional support.

Representatives from Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland voted to start the program while Belgium, Finland, Italy, and the United Kingdom backed the project pending confirmation from their governments. The remaining four - Denmark, France, Portugal and Spain - said they continue to work towards approval.

Brazil plans to join the ESO Council this year and Chile, which will play host to the telescope on top of the 3,060-metre Cerro Armazones mountain in the Atacama Desert, is also involved.

“Today’s announcement is an important step towards construction, though the final go-ahead depends of course on obtaining approval by a number of governments … to such a long-term financial commitment,” said John Womersley, chief executive of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.

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NASA gains 2 powerful repurposed space telescopes

NASA is looking into funding options both to refit the spy telescopes for space exploration and to launch to them into space.

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Giant radio telescope gets split location;  Array will scan sky 10,000 times faster and with 50 times the sensitivity of any other telescope

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One of Europe’s main contributions to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is built and ready to ship to the US.

The Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri) will gather key data as the $9bn (£5.5bn) observatory seeks to identify the first starlight in the Universe.

The results of testing conducted at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK have just been signed off, clearing Miri to travel to America.

James Webb - regarded as the successor to Hubble - is due to launch in 2018.

It will carry a 6.5m primary mirror (more than double the width of Hubble’s main mirror), and a shield the size of a tennis court to guard its sensitive vision from the heat and strong light of our Sun.

The observatory has been tasked with tracking down the very first luminous objects in the cosmos - groupings of the first generation of stars to burst into life.

To do so, Webb will use its infrared detectors to look deeper into space than Hubble, and further back in time - to a period more than 13 billion years ago.

“The other instruments on James Webb will do massive surveys of the sky, looking for these very rare objects; they will find the candidates,” explained Miri’s UK principal investigator, Prof Gillian Wright.

“But Miri has a very special role because it will be the instrument that looks at these candidates to determine which of them is a true first light object. Only Miri can give us that confirmation,” she told BBC News.

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India has decided to formally join a project to construct the world’s largest telescope

“India has already got the status of an observer in the project to construct the largest telescope of 30-metre aperture,” said a senior official from the Earth Sciences Ministry.

The telescope will have the capability to focus sharply and collect data and pictures. Along with the US, Canada, Japan and China are members of the project and have started the early construction phase of the telescope, which is expected to be completed by 2019.

The telescope will be 10 times more powerful than the world’s largest Hubble telescope and will be fitted with high powered optical spectrometer, infrared imaging spectrometer and infrared multi-object spectrometer.

Several Indian institutions such as Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research will participate in the project.

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DOE approves first step for enormous ‘time-lapse’ telescope

The LSST will gather 6 million gigabytes of data annually, and its detailed images will teach astronomers more about dark energy and near-Earth asteroids.

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The world’s most powerful telescopes

Only in the last 60 years have we made progress in understanding our skies through huge powerful telescopes. Here’s a look at some of the most impressive scopes in the world.

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