12/5/2023 0 Comments World big telescopeWith the inability to follow up using that instrument, FAST is now “really the only telescope that’s possible,” McLaughlin said. Her research group discovered a few hard-to-detect RRATs using Arecibo. Maura McLaughlin, a senior researcher with NANOGrav and a professor of physics and astronomy at West Virginia University, is also planning to suggest the FAST telescope peer at “rotating radio transients,” or RRATs - essentially pulsars that just blip on occasion. “It kind of lifts all boats, that rising tide.” The more people from more places that come through and use the telescope. “Observatories generally feel that they benefit by having an influx. When Arecibo collapsed, the team was left looking for a new instrument. But to get the job done, astronomers must spy every couple weeks on a network of pulsars, for which they had previously used both Arecibo and America’s next-largest instrument, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. In aggregate, that messy timetable indicates that ripples in the fabric of the universe called gravitational waves are stretching or squishing said fabric. The group watches to see if pulsars’ pulses, which emit like clockwork, arrive delayed, or arrive early. “It kind of lifts all boats, that rising tide.”Ĭ ordes and colleagues are hoping to use FAST at some point for work on a project called NANOGrav (short for North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves). The more people from more places that come through and use the telescope,” said Cordes. Collaboration, it turns out, rarely comes without complication.īut American and Chinese astronomers both hope this particular opportunity will nevertheless work smoothly for both sides. Current federal law in the U.S., for instance, severely limits NASA and its scientists from working on projects with China and its scientists. fears its rival would like to steal intellectual property, and concrete restrictions exist for certain space scientists who’d like to work across these particular borders. and China: American researchers have faced increasing censure for taking undisclosed money from China, the U.S. But scientific tensions and suspicions currently run high between the U.S. It also reflects China’s broader efforts to host world-class facilities that foreign researchers envy - a flex of global muscle. This new openness mirrors the way many large observatories around the world work, in which an Open Skies policy lets anyone from anywhere compete for observing time. Several months later another structural failure destroyed the dish. “We expect that FAST would not only take the place of Arecibo in supporting astronomers doing good science in relevant research areas,” said Qiu, “but also make breakthroughs and open new windows for research in radio astronomy.”ĭamage to the Arecibo radio telescope in August 2020, when a steel cable snapped. If the international researchers’ ideas pass muster, they will get approximately 10 percent of the telescope’s time, with the remaining 90 percent going to Chinese scientists. Qiu leads the committee that will evaluate the incoming ideas and added, “The FAST group worked very hard over the past year, and now the telescope is making the step forward” by opening up to the world. “The timeline was very tight, and it was extremely difficult to get everything ready for opening to the world that time,” Keping Qiu, a professor in the School of Astronomy and Space Science at Nanjing University, wrote in an email to Undark. They deemed it ready for proposals from would-be users in China early last year. After that initial completion, scientists and engineers spent years commissioning it and bringing it up to full scientific operation. Until, that is, FAST opened to them, for the first time since its construction finished in 2016. With Arecibo off the table, Cordes - and many other astronomers who used Arecibo to study stars’ evolution and discover distant galaxies - were left with one less option, and no option as sensitive, to do their work. The leftovers, if oriented the right way, beam radio waves at Earth, like very distant lighthouses. Cordes studies strange objects called pulsars, spinning cores that remain when giant stars explode at the end of their lives. That disappearance left astronomers like James Cordes of Cornell University scrambling. Related On Contested Ground, SKA Looks to the Heavens
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