Three observation devices brought great progress in space observation in the last 20 years.
The Spitzer Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to hunt exoplanets and the earth-based CHIME telescope.
Welcome to the hunt of exoplanets and galaxies far far away from ours…
Since 2003, the Spitzer space telescope has delivered tremendous new information for space science.
Only planned to operate for 2 ½ years the liquid helium supply to cool the most instruments of the telescope to hold until May 2009.
Then, the “Infrared Spectrograph” and the “Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer” were no longer able to operate.
Only the two shortest-wavelength modules of the IRAC camera continued to operate until the necessary cryogen exhausted.
Spitzer was named after Lyman Spitzer, an astronomer who promoted the concept of space telescopes in the 1940s.
Spitzer operates in the so-called earth-trailing orbit which means that the telescope is trailing and drifting away from Earth’s orbit.
His primary mirror is 85 centimeters in diameter with an f/12 lens made of beryllium and cooled to -268 degrees Celsius.
Spitzer instruments allow to perform astronomical imaging and photometry from 3.6 to 160 micrometers, spectroscopy from 5.2 to 38 micrometers,...
...and spectrophotometry from 5 to 100 micrometers.
Spitzer helped researchers to find out that the Milky Way has a more substantial bar structure across its core and an 80-light-year long nebula near the center.
In 2009, evidence of a high-speed collision between two burgeoning planets was detected.
Spitzer used the transit photometry and gravitational microlensing techniques to perform observations of exoplanets.
Another example of an exoplanet found by Spitzer is HD 219134 b, a rocky planet about 1.5 times as large as Earth in a three-day orbit around its star.
Before Spitzer retired on January 30, 2020 its last job was to support the work of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Good afternoon,...
I’m welcoming all family and friends of the Spitzer Space Telescope as we see the end of mission today.
At this time, all of the members that supported the mission that’s in the friends and family area could you please stand up.
To really acknowledge all of the great accomplishments that we had have with the Spitzer Space Telescope.
TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is a so-called exoplanet hunter of NASA and the MIT.
TESS was launched with a Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX in April 2018.
After releasing TESS, the second stage of the Falcon 9 returned to Earth to process an experimental water landing, as part of SpaceX's attempt to develop rocket reusability.
TESS operates in a novel highly-elliptical Earth orbit.
Its mission is to survey the 200,000 brightest G-, K- and M-stars near Earth to find orbiting exoplanets.
The observation area is 400 times larger than the one covered by the Kepler mission.
In August 2018, TESS started to observe 85% of the sky with its array of wide-field CCD cameras.
TESS can study the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets.
This also includes samples of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars.
Promising targets are further investigated by the James Web Telescope.
In September 2018, TESS found a super-Earth sized exoplanet named LHS 3844b.
HD202772A/B is a “hot Jupiter” orbiting the binary star HD202772, located in the constellation Capricornus 480 light years away
HD 21749c is a rocky earth-sized planet with about 89% of Earth's diameter orbiting the K-type star HD 21749.
The planet has an estimated temperature of 429 degrees Celsius.
Until July 2020, TESS identified more than 2000 exoplanet candidates as only 66 have been confirmed.
In August 2020, a group of researchers from the University of Warwick published that for the first time an AI algorithm identified 50 exoplanets out of a list of 8 000 exoplanet candidates.
The possibility to identify exoplanets through an AI will lead the way for a faster confirmation of exoplanet candidates.
400 kilometers east of Vancouver is a radio telescope named “Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment”, in short, called CHIME.
CHIME was developed and optimized to map the most abundant element in the universe:
hydrogen.
It's high-speed mapping capability forms a 3-dimontional map of hydrogen density to measure the expansion history of the universe.
CHIME wants to answer one of our biggest questions in science:
“Why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating?"
The pioneered use of radio emission to detect hydrogen discovered new “Fast Radio Bursts” (FRBs).
FRBs are a few millisecond long bursts of radio waves.
The CHIME FRB Detector scans continuously 1024 points in the sky every week.
FRBs are detected from all over the night sky.
As their exact position and origin is still unknown, we only know that they reach us from far out of our galaxy.
CHIMEs four cylindrical reflectors receive radiation signals in a spectrum of 400 to 800 megahertz, processes and stores them for further processing to a sky map.
CHIME’s Pulsar Monitoring Instrument is able to observe 10 pulsars at the same time.
It’s also sensitive enough to measure relics of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, so-called BAOs.
The capability of CHIME to detect low radio frequencies will facilitate the removal of the effects of the variable interstellar space to the radio pulses.
This is one important step to be able to detect gravitational waves.
Since the discoveries of Edwin Hubble, we know that the universe is increasing its expansion speed.
The reason for the acceleration is unknown but dark energy is said to be responsible for this phenomenon.
The Dark Energy Survey, Euclid and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, based on CHIME’s technology, investigating the dark energy.
In loving Memory of Alois Rupp A true explorer in life.