Friends of Palomar Observatory P.O. Box 200 Palomar Mountain, CA 92060-0200 The Big Eye The Newsletter of the Friends of Palomar Observatory Vol. 2, No. 1 Solar System Now Palomar’s Astronomical Has Eight Planets Bandwidth The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recently downgraded the status of Pluto to that of a “dwarf plan- For the past three years, astronomers at the et,” a designation that will also be applied to the spheri- California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Obser- cal body discovered last year by California Institute of vatory in Southern California have been using the Technology planetary scientist Mike Brown and his col- High Performance Wireless Research and Education leagues. The decision means that only the rocky worlds Network (HPWREN) as the data transfer cyberin- of the inner solar system and the gas giants of the outer frastructure to further our understanding of the uni- system will hereafter be designated as planets. verse. Recent applications include the study of some The ruling effectively settles a year-long controversy of the most cataclysmic explosions in the universe, about whether the spherical body announced last year and the hunt for extrasolar planets, and the discovery informally named “Xena” would rise to planetary status. of our solar system’s tenth planet. The data for all Somewhat larger than Pluto, the body has been informally this research is transferred via HPWREN from the known as Xena since the formal announcement of its remote mountain observatory to college campuses discovery on July 29, 2005, by Brown and his co-discov- hundreds of miles away. erers, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory and David Funded by the National Science Foundation, HP- Rabinowitz of Yale University. Xena will now be known WREN provides Palomar Observatory with a high- as the largest dwarf planet. speed network connection that helps enable new “I’m of course disappointed that Xena will not be the ways of undertaking astronomy research consistent tenth planet, but I definitely support the IAU in this dif- with the data demands of today’s scientists. Specifi- Friends of Palomar Observatory Annual Membership Application ficult and courageous decision,” said Brown. “It is scien- cally, the HPWREN bandwidth allows astronomers tifically the right thing to do, and is a great step forward to transfer a 100MB image from a telescope camera in astronomy. at Palomar to their campus laboratories in less than “Pluto would never be considered a planet if it were 30 seconds. discovered today, and I think the fact that we’ve now Student/Senior Citizen Member $30 Individual Member $45 Family Membership $75 found one Kuiper-belt object bigger than Pluto under- Name __________________________________ Address _______________________________ scores its shaky status.” Pluto was discovered in 1930. Because of its size and City ________________ State ___ Zip ______ Phone _________________________________ distance from Earth, astronomers had no idea of its com- position or other characteristics at the time. But having Email _________________________________ no reason to think that many other similar bodies would eventually be found in the outer reaches of the solar Check Visa Mastercard (circle one) Credit Card # __________________________ system--or that a new type of body even existed in the region--they assumed that designating the new discover Expiration Date ________________________ Signature ______________________________ as the ninth planet was a scientifically accurate decision. Continued on page 4 For questions call (760) 742-2111, e-mail [email protected], or visit Samuel Oschin Telescope with HPWREN antenna www.friendsofpalomarobservatory.org Continued on page 2 Astronomical Bandwidth, continued from page 1 “The Palomar Observatory is by far our most of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory says Did You Know? bandwidth-demanding partner,” says Hans-Werner “The recent discovery that the expansion of the uni- Braun, HPWREN principal investigator, a research verse is speeding up has turned the fields of cosmology scientist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center and fundamental physics on their heads. The QUEST * The Hale Telescope’s 200-inch primary mirror is made of Pyrex glass. at UC San Diego. “Palomar is able to run the 45 camera and the speedy HPWREN link are giving us megabits-per-second HPWREN backbone flat out and an unprecedented sample of supernovae for pursuing * The mirror was cast by Corning Glassworks in upstate New York will be able to utilize substantially more bandwidth in this exciting discovery. The Palomar supernovae will in 1934. It cooled for more than 10 months. the future. The current plan is to upgrade critical links be compared with supernovae from the Hubble Space that support the observatory to 155 Mbps and create a Telescope and other telescopes to try to determine what * The mirror’s waffle-like backside was created by numerous redundant 45 Mbps path for a combined 200 megabits- is causing this acceleration.” ceramic blocks that had to be sandblasted out of the glass after per-second access speed at the observatory.” One of the universe’s most mysterious and explosive it had cooled. Last summer astronomers making use of the events is the phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burst Palomar 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope announced (GRB). They are briefly bright enough to be visible * The 20 ton-mirror was ground and polished at Caltech in the discovery of what some are calling our solar billions of light years away, but they are difficult to Pasadena. 5.5 tons of glass were removed in preparing the system’s tenth planet. The object has been confirmed to study because they are very short lived and take place at surface in an effort that took more than 180,000 man hours. be larger than Pluto. The telescope uses a 161-million- seemingly random locations and times. pixel camera – one of the largest and most capable in Astronomers rely on satellites like Swift which * The surface of the finished mirror is accurate to within two millionths the world. HPWREN enables a large volume of data detects a GRB and immediately relays the information of an inch. Caltech called it “The most daring optical job ever attempted by man.” to be moved off the mountain to each astronomer’s to observers worldwide via the Gamma-Ray Burst home base. Modern digital technology with pipeline Coordinates Network. * When the mirror was shipped to Palomar in 1947 a worker noticed what appeared to be a thin crack in the processing of the data produced enables astronomers to If a gamma-ray burst occurs when it is dark and disc’s center hole. Upon closer inspection it was discovered that it wasn’t a scratch. It was the signature of the detect very faint moving and transient objects. clear at Palomar, the observatory’s robotic 60-inch mirror’s chief optician Marcus H. Brown. To find these objects, the telescope takes a relatively telescope immediately slews to the coordinates short exposure of a section of the sky. It then goes off provided and images the fading optical glow of the * The final adjustments to the mirror’s shape included the addition of several fishing scales to pull the mirror’s and images a pre-arranged sequence of such target explosion. “The rapid response by the Palomar 60- outer edge into perfection. fields. After a period of time it comes back and repeats inch telescope is possible only because of HPWREN. the sequence. Then it does it again after another With it we have observed and categorized some of the * The mirror’s reflective surface is made of a thin layer of aluminum that weighs less than half an ounce and is interval. Any objects that are visible in all three images, most distant and energetic explosions in the universe,” replaced on average every year and a half. but move consistently with respect to the background remarks Shri Kulkarni, MacArthur Professor of star field, are solar system objects such as asteroids, Astronomy and Planetary Science and director of the comets or Kuiper Belt objects. Because of the large Caltech Optical Observatories. These observations amount of data, pipeline processing is used both to have allowed astronomers to reach new frontiers by Mickey and Pluto? detect such objects and to calculate their preliminary classifying the bursts and theorizing about their origins. orbits from the initial triplet data. Sedna and the tenth For the last decade astronomers have been using Caltech astronomer Tom Jarrett recently imaged Pluto planet, 2003UB313, were found using this technique, as indirect methods and giant telescopes (like the Keck (arrowed) using Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch Hale Tele- were a large number of Near Earth Asteroids by the Jet in Hawaii) to make their first discoveries of planets scope using its Wide-field Infrared Camera. Propulsion Laboratory’s Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking outside our solar system (called exoplanets). The (NEAT) program. smallest telescope at the Palomar Observatory is Curiously when this image of Pluto was recorded it hap- The Nearby Supernova Factory piggybacks their performing its own search for exoplanets. With a small pened to be close in the sky to a grouping of three stars (left hunt for a certain type of exploding star, known as Type telescope it is possible to detect a giant Jupiter-sized of Pluto) that calls to mind a cartoon mouse that is associ- Ia supernovae, with the data collected by the NEAT world that lies close to its parent star. By looking at ated with the animated dog named Pluto. program, and they then use the observations of these a great many stars each night the HPWREN-powered supernovae as “standard candles” for measuring the Sleuth Telescope hopes to catch such a planet in the act accelerating expansion of the universe.