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| AST/RO and SPT: A Tale of Two Telescopes on the Antarctic Plateau |
| Dr. Anthony Stark |
| Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 8:00 PM |
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This month we welcome Dr. A. Anthony Stark, Astronomer in the Radio and Geoastronomy Division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Principal Investigator and designer of the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope, and Co-PI on the new South Pole Telescope (SPT). He has worked at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station almost every year since 1986. In his talk, “AST/RO and SPT: A tale of two Telescopes on the Antarctic Plateau”, we will hear about these instruments and their science.
The Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO) was the first instrument to benefit from the superb submillimeter-wave observing conditions during the frigid South Pole night. Designed as a small (1.7m) prototype for the SPT, it was commissioned in January 1995, and operated for ten years. Both SPT and AST/RO are offset gregorians operating at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. AST/RO’s principal mission was measurement of the spectral lines that cool the molecular gas in star-forming clouds throughout the Milky Way. The AST/RO team has shown that the dense gas surrounding the Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way is unstable, leading to quasi-periodic bursts of star formation and eruptions from the Black Hole.
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter diameter high-frequency radio telescope. It became operational at the South Pole on February 16, 2007. The novel optical design can feed thousands of detectors simultaneously, and thereby achieve unprecedented levels of sensitivity. The initial SPT project is a survey of a 4000 square degree swath of the southern sky at frequencies of 90 and 150 GHz. This will lead to the discovery of many thousands of clusters of galaxies, which will be detected as a shadow against the Cosmic Microwave Background. Many of these clusters will be very distant, and we will therefore see them as they were billions of years ago, in the early Universe. The Universe appears to be filled with a mysterious Dark Energy that dominates large-scale dynamics. Dark Energy is not well understood; determination of its properties is at the forefront of current physics research. It may be a new force of nature, embodied in Einstein’s Cosmological Constant, or a poorly-understood aspect of particle physics. Since the evolution and appearance of clusters is sensitive to the balance between gravity and the Dark Energy, the SPT detection of clusters and their study with other telescopes will bring a substantial advance in our knowledge of the Universe.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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