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Depending on source class and telescope location it ruins between 1/3 and 1/2 of the available observing time. Are you willing to pay $1 more in taxes to to fun
by petschge 7y ago
Depending on source class and telescope location it ruins between 1/3 and 1/2 of the available observing time. Are you willing to pay $1 more in taxes to to fund the extra telescopes we need to make up the short fall? Please write to your representatives and senators if you do.
- modeless 7y agoYes, I am for building more telescopes, and especially space based ones which should become much cheaper to launch when SpaceX's Starship is ready.
- petschge 7y agoSpace based works for optical, but not all other wave length. For example it will also reduce the sensitivity of air cherenkov telescopes that detect gamma rays and that can not be moved to space.
- xur17 7y agoWhy can't those be moved to space?
- rtkwe 7y agoThey are imaging the flashes as the relativistic particles slam into our atmosphere. No atmosphere, no flash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IACT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IACT
- HorstG 7y agoBecause cherenkov radiation is only observable in a transparent medium like air or water. Space doesn't work because the speed of light in space equals the speed of light in vacuum, therefore no cherenkov radiation.
- Taniwha 7y agoCouldn't they look down?
- HorstG 7y agoCherenkov telescopes for neutrinos do look down for reasons of schielding. Neutrinos can pass the earth, other particles not so much. But those are a special case, air cherenkov telescopes are looking for "less weird" particles like photons or protons. Those can only be seen looking up, since the primary particles moving down focuses the cherenkov light down in a narrow cone.
- petschge 7y agoThe Cherenkov emission is boosted in the direction of travel, i.e. downward. And there are too many lights on the surface of the Earth.
- m4rtink 7y agoWhile this certainly requires non trivial large scale space engineering, you should be able to build in in principle. Basically a big bubble filled with the most useful gas for this + bunch of photodetectors inside at the appropriate places. You could also make the whole detection chamber much larger, than the ~30 km (?) of reasonably thick atmosphere you get on Earth.
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- Ajedi32 7y agoWould air cherenkov telescopes be significantly affected by additional satellites in orbit? It sounds like they're designed to detect high energy gamma rays striking the atmosphere, so probably not?
- SiempreViernes 7y agoIn practice they are looking for very weak flashes of light, adding extra background light obviously reduced sensitivity.
- dnautics 7y agois cherenkov radiation even observable during dawn/dusk +/- 2 hours? I imagine that the atmospheric refraction of the sun would seriously hamper those observations during that time period.
- nwallin 7y agoI'm struggling to see how starlink will affect those telescopes. Please explain?
- gizmo385 7y agoSatellites and space-based telescopes are still monumentally expensive even if you ignore launch cost. The James Web Space Telescope has cost almost 10 billion dollars in development and won't even launch until (unless the schedule slips again) next year.
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- modeless 7y agoOne of the reasons JWST is expensive is its complex folding mechanism. Starship could launch a mirror bigger than JWST's in one piece. Another reason is that they're only launching one and it has to work perfectly the first and only time it's launched. That level of reliability in a one-off product is incredibly expensive to achieve. With dramatically cheaper launches it would make sense to launch a much larger number of less reliable but much less expensive telescopes. Another reason is politics, but SpaceX can't solve that one.
- pawelk 7y ago> it would make sense to launch a much larger number of less reliable but much less expensive telescopes What if... SpaceX made up for the pollution they introduce by making the Starlink satellites look up the other way and push the captured data back to earth? The lens and CCD would be small, but with the massive volume (and clear sky) it could add up. Like the amateur set ups using an array of consumer grade cameras.
- FeepingCreature 7y agoSpace-based telescopes are expensive in part because launches are expensive, making it more effective to spend a lot of money on single telescopes.