Scientists Reveal How Many Interstellar Objects May Be Visiting Our Solar System sciencealert.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sciencealert.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Share
Hundreds of fibers, arranged by hand, capture light at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s New Mexico telescope. DAN LONG/APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY
Astronomy surveys aim to up the pace with army of tiny robots
Feb. 3, 2021 , 3:25 PM
It was one of the stranger and more monotonous jobs in astronomy: plugging optical fibers into hundreds of holes in aluminum plates. Every day, technicians with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) prepped up to 10 plates that would be placed that night at the focus of the survey’s telescopes in Chile and New Mexico. The holes matched the exact positions of stars, galaxies, or other bright objects in the telescopes’ view. Light from each object fell directly on a fiber and was whisked off to a spectrograph, which split the light into its component wavelengths, revealing key details such as what the object is made of and how it is moving.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has reignited a debate about whether alien life can explain an object that visited the solar system in 2017 in a scathing new book.
Observations shed more light on the atmosphere of white dwarf GD 424 phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.