Monday, October 22, 2007

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SEASON 1 (2006-2007)
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Monday, January 15, 2007

A Bit About The Science


The South Pole Telescope doesn’t look at the kind of light that’s visible to human eyes; it looks at microwave light with wavelengths of a few mm. If you go outside at night and look up at the stars, what you mostly see isn’t stars but black, empty space. If instead you went outside with beach-ball-sized microwave eyes and looked up, the whole sky would be glowing with light. This light was released very early in the universe’s history and is known as the “Cosmic Microwave Background” or “CMB”. Amazingly, careful study of this light has allowed cosmologists to measure the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) and what it is made of (4% normal matter, like what you and I and stars are made of; 22% dark matter, a type of matter that doesn’t interact with light and is thus dark; and 74% dark energy, a completely strange and poorly understood force that is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate).

The first big goal of the South Pole Telescope is to get a better handle on this mysterious dark energy. Here’s a breakdown of how this will happen:

  • Stars are grouped into galaxies. Our Sun is only 1 out of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
  • Galaxies themselves are grouped into massive clumps of galaxies known as galaxy clusters. These are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe. (“galaxy cluster” is a misnomer; these things are essentially big globs of dark matter with a sprinkling of galaxies tossed in).
  • The Cosmic Microwave Background acts as a backlight to these galaxy clusters. That is, the galaxy cluster distorts the CMB, and observing this distortion allows you to see the galaxy cluster.
  • The SPT will employ this method to hopefully discover 1000’s of new galaxy clusters.
  • A careful analysis of these galaxy clusters will allow us to learn a lot about how and when dark energy came to dominate our universe.

If that last sentence is a little unclear, here is some further explanation:

The universe began as a much simpler place than the one we see today. Whereas the current universe contains a rich structure of stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, the early universe was a soup of smoothly distributed matter. How did the smooth, early universe become the clumpy universe of today? The answer is gravity. Gravity makes matter collapse upon itself. In fact, because there is a lot more dark matter than normal matter (remember from above: 22% vs 4%), the main structures in the universe are dark; all the stars and galaxies you’ve ever seen pictures of are just along for the ride.

So dark matter (along with gravity) causes the growth of structure in the universe. As it turns out, dark energy inhibits the growth of structure. It’s actually a very simple battle between the two; dark matter is trying to pull stuff together (--> <--), and dark energy is trying to blow stuff apart (<-- -->). Now, this is where the South Pole Telescope comes back into the picture. By discovering 1000’s of new galaxy clusters, the SPT will catalog the history of structure formation in the universe. This, in turn, will allow us to study the battle between dark matter and dark energy, and to see how and when dark energy came to dominate the battle, as it is believed to do.

Hopefully we'll begin to probe this exciting science when we finish the telescope in about a month. It should be a thrilling year!

Sunday, January 07, 2007

The reflector is on the telescope!



A few days ago we reached a huge milestone for the South Pole Telescope. 43 days after we arrived, the reflector has been installed on the telescope. My internet connection is about to die, so I've got to leave it at that, but I promise more later!

More later: so this was a really big deal for us. To begin with, Steve, Tom, Jeff, Joaquin and I had spent the better part of the past 7 months working on the reflector in some form or fashion, including a multi-month test build in +100F East Texas Summer. More recently were the 2000 man-hours of work involved in assembling the reflector here at the Pole. Of course none of this would matter if we didn't have a telescope to put the reflector on, so let us not forget our rock-solid iron crew, led by Erik "Grande" "Baby" Nichols. Not only do these men and women work wonders with 5 ton pieces of steel in -60F weather, but also consistently risk social humiliation by hanging out with us beakers (south pole for "scientists"). They are a very fun group of people and are, 4000 man-hours later, responsible for building the bulk of the South Pole Telescope.

Due to the impressive logistical and managerial skills of the higher-ups (such as Steve Padin), the telescope and reflector were finished within days of each other. What followed was a multi-step, multi-day lift of the reflector onto the telescope. Here are some photos of the lift.



The reflector is lifted from the adapter cone (which, for those of you who know a little about materials with extremely low coefficients of thermal expansion, is supposedly one of the largest pieces of invar in the world).


The adapter cone is lifted onto the telescope.


The big day arrives. About 40 people -- SPT people, iron workers, station managers, photographers, film makers -- were present at the lift. The two crane lift was captured nicely in this photo by Jerry Marty. That's Jeff, Tom and me on the left, doing what we do best.



And we're done! Iron worker Brian Hardin rightfully celebrates the flawlessly executed lift.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

new pictures

I've posted some exciting, new photographs which were taken over the past few weeks.

the New Year and Skiing


The New Year's party here was pretty great. Beneath the canopy of an enormous cargo parachute, two homegrown bands (including Snow Blind, which featured our very own Tom Crawford on bass and vocals) rocked the crowd until the early morn. I don't have any photos, but I do have this horribly shot record of the countdown.

The next day we all woke up to amazingly warm weather; an overnight heat wave had shot the temperature up to -0.7 F. In order to take advantage of this freak occurrence I decided to go skiing down the airplane runway, or "skiway", as it's known here. Stupid as my plan might sound, as long as no planes are scheduled to land during the next 2 hours, this is an officially sanctioned form of recreation. As it turns out, telemark skiing is pretty hard, especially for someone who has never tried it. After a while I got the hang of it, and it became pretty fun. It was certainly nice to get away from the sounds and sights of the station for an hour and to just stare out at the ice shelf. Here are some skiing photos.