Future of Astronomy

Astronomy 315Professor Lee

CarknerLecture 23

Yerkes Observatory

1897

The Future of Astronomy

What would we like to understand better? Formation and evolution of stars and

planets

Formation and evolution of black holes

Problems and Solutions

We want to study fainter objects

We want better detail

We want to study a broad range of astrophysical phenomena Use multiwavelength telescopes

Key Initiatives

While much science is done with small and common instruments, there are several large and expensive new projects that we hope will lead to big breakthroughs

Three of these are: A Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope

Webb Space Telescope

See earliest galaxies

View protoplanetary disks

To be launched in 2013 (?) Cost:

Webb Format

Want to be both high performance and cheap

To get large mirror to fit in small launch vehicle, mirror folds up

Constellation X Would have collecting area ~100 times

larger than current X-ray telescopes Would be able to get high resolution X-

ray spectra of:

Key challenge is coordinating the 4 telescopes

Future Ground Based Telescopes

Currently the worlds largest telescope is the 10 meter Keck on Mauna Kea

Much larger telescopes are called ELTs

US is looking into a 30 meter Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope (GSMT)

Extremely Large Telescopes

Success of large telescopes depends on adaptive optics

ELT’s would complement NGST For follow up observations that require

greater sensitivity

HobbyEberly

Telescope1997

Telescope Trends

21st century astronomy versus 20th century astronomy:

Next Time

Meet in planetarium Bring telescope sketches to hand

in Be prepared to sketch the Sun