Astronomers in China working with one of world’s largest optical telescopes released a huge collection of data over the new year holiday, increasing the chances of “significant findings” in space exploration, experts say.
The latest update to the National Astronomical Observatories’ sky survey, conducted using the LAMOST telescope, includes some 4.62 million spectral data relating to the structure, formation and evolution of the Milky Way.
LAMOST－short for Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope－has been used to carry out a massive sky survey since September 2012. So far, it has collected more data than all previous sky surveys combined, according to the NAO.
“As more and more data are released, there will be more significant findings,” said Yan Jun, director of the NAO.
Chu Yaoquan, deputy director of operations and development at LAMOST, described the survey as like a census of the stars. “The project gives us a large sample of stars. With the large sample－say, a few million－we can know more about the past and present of the galaxy,” he explained in an earlier interview.
Published by ECNS China. See more at: http://www.ecns.cn/2016/01-04/194497.shtml
NPR: Enter the Quiet Zone
There are no physical signs you’ve entered the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area that covers the eastern half of West Virginia. But the silence gives you a signal. Somewhere around the Virginia-West Virginia state line, the periodic buzzes and pings of our smartphones stopped.
“Zero [service]. Searching,” said photographer John Poole, who traveled with me to the zone.
Almost every radio station disappeared, too, except forAllegheny Mountain Radio, which broadcasts at a low enough frequency to avoid being banned.
“We didn’t realize the rest of the world was getting connected and staying connected constantly, via phones and computers and all that,” said radio host Caleb Diller, who grew up in Pocahontas County, W.Va. “So we were kinda back in time a little bit. We hadn’t progressed to that.”
The county still hasn’t progressed to constant connectivity. That’s because it sits within a zone designed to protect a sophisticated radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory from interference. The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope.
Radio telescopes work by tracking and reading the energy waves that come from stars or gases, but they have to be located in sparsely populated areas to avoid electromagnetic interference.
The Green Bank Telescope looks like a giant dish. It’s as tall as the Washington Monument and large enough to fit 2 acres of land in it.
“It’s a huge collecting area and it’s what allows us to see these incredibly small energies that we’re trying to study,” says Karen O’Neil, who oversees the site. “The types of energies we look at are less than the energy of a single snowflake falling on the earth.”
Source: NPR, All Tech Considered. Get the transcript here.