The hills of West Texas rise in waves around the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, a powerful instrument encased in a dome that looks like the Epcot ball. Soon, it will become more powerful still: Scientists recently primed the telescope to find evidence of dark energy in the early universe, prying open its eye so it can see and process a wide swath of sky. On April 8, scientists will dedicate the new telescope, capping off the $40 million upgrade and beginning the real work.
The hills of West Texas rise in waves around the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, a powerful instrument encased in a dome that looks like the Epcot ball. Soon, it will become more powerful still: Scientists recently primed the telescope to find evidence of dark energy in the early universe, prying open its eye so it can see and process a wide swath of sky. On April 8, scientists will dedicate the new telescope, capping off the $40 million upgrade and beginning the real work.
The dark energy experiment, called Hetdex, isn’t how astronomy has traditionally been done. In the classical model, a lone astronomer goes to a mountaintop and solemnly points a telescope at one predetermined object. But Hetdex won’t look for any objects in particular; it will just scan the sky and churn petabytes of the resulting data through a silicon visual cortex. That’s only possible because of today’s steroidal computers, which let scientists analyze, store, and send such massive quantities of data.
The hope is so-called blind surveys like this one will find stuff astronomers never even knew to look for. In this realm, computers take over curation of the sky, telling astronomers what is interesting and worthy of further study, rather than the other way around. These wide-eyed projects are becoming a standard part of astronomers’ arsenal, and the greatest part about them is that their best discoveries are still totally TBD.
Read more at Wired
Photo credit: Fredlyfish4 via Wikimedia Commons
