ACT Telescope

Act telescope

Atacama Cosmology Telescope

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope

The goals of the ACT project are to study how the universe began, what it is made of, and how it evolved to its current state. This pursuit is part of the field of scientific cosmology in one which asks questions about the Universe on the largest and grandest scales. Over the past two decades, there has been a tremendous flourishing of the field, driven by many excellent astronomical measurements. This has led to the development of a precise and elegant understanding of cosmology.

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) is a six-metre telescope on Cerro Toco in theAtacama Desert in the north of Chile, near theLlano de Chajnantor Observatory. It is designed to make high-resolution, microwave-wavelength surveys of the sky in order to study the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). At an altitude of 5190 metres (17,030 feet), it is one of the highest permanent, ground-based telescopes in the world.

ACT experiment has two main goals to further our knowledge of cosmology:

To improve on the measurements of parameters which describe the very early universe
To measure distant, large clusters of galaxies and their environments.

Erected in the (austral) autumn of 2007, ACT saw first light on 22 October 2007 with its science receiver, the Millimeter BolometerArray Camera (MBAC), and completed its first season in December 2007. It began its second season of observations in June 2008.

The project is a collaboration betweenPrinceton University, Cornell University, theUniversity of Pennsylvania, NASA/GSFC, theJohns Hopkins University, the University of British Columbia, NIST, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Cardiff University, Rutgers University, the University of Pittsburgh,Columbia University, Haverford College, West Chester University, INAOE, LLNL, NASA/JPL, the University of Toronto, the University of Cape Town, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and York College, CUNY. It is funded by the US National Science Foundation.

Comments

Black hole

A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole . Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace . The first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole was found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpretation as a region of space from which nothing can escape was first published by David Finkelstein in 1958. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was during the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron st...

The Sun

The sun lies at the heart of the solar system, where it is by far the largest object. It holds 99.8 percent of the solar system's mass and is roughly 109 times the diameter of the Earth — about one million Earths could fit inside the sun. The visible part of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius), while temperatures in the core reach more than 27 million F (15 million C), driven by nuclear reactions. One would need to explode 100 billion tons of dynamite every second to match the energy produced by the sun, according to NASA. The sun has enough nuclear fuel to stay much as it is now for another 5 billion years. After that, it will swell to become a red giant . Eventually, it will shed its outer layers, and the remaining core will collapse to become a white dwarf . Slowly, this will fade, to enter its final phase as a dim, cool theoretical object sometimes known as a black dwarf .

Planet - Mercury

Mercury is a planet in our solar system. It is the smallest of the eight planets. It is also the closest to the sun. Mercury goes around the sun the fastest of all the planets. Mercury has no moons. Mercury's physical characteristics Because the planet is so close to the sun,Mercury surface temperature can reach a scorching 840 degrees Fahrenheit (450 degrees Celsius). However, since this world doesn't have a real atmosphere to entrap any heat, at night temperatures can plummet to minus 275 F (minus 170 C), a temperature swing of more than 1,100 degrees F (600 degree C), the greatest in the solar system. Mercury's elliptical orbit takes the small planet as close as 29 million miles (47 million kilometers) and as far as 43 million miles (70 million kilometers) from the sun. If one could stand on the scorching surface of Mercury when it is at its closest point to the sun, the sun would appear almost three times as large as it does when viewed from Earth ...

Space and Science

Search This Blog